I was talking to Donna Burbank, Director of Enterprise Modelling and Architecture Solutions at Embarcadero a few days ago—she was briefing me about the company's new EA/Studio product. We digressed a fair bit along the way, particularly sharing notes regarding our experiences of how Enterprise Architecture (EA) actually works in the real world. A key point we discussed was the importance of focusing on EA as a journey, rather than as a destination.

It's all too easy to focus on the technical nature of EA outputs; which bits of the Zachman Framework should we complete? Should we mandate that all our models use UML?… and so on. Now don't get me wrong, it's important to get a handle on the scope of your efforts, and try and create some consistency in what gets done—but these things are means to an end, not the end in itself.

Where I see organisations spending a lot of time worrying about the format and scope of EA outputs and artefacts, often, perversely, it comes about because there's a lack of organisational ambition regarding the role and contribution of EA as a practice. The hole left by a lack of ambition here is often filled by huge technical ambition: "let's model the world". We all know what happens if you follow that road too far.

For EA practice to have a valuable contribution, it has to be prepared to prioritise conversations with business people (and less so with other IT people) over conversations with other architects. Although that's not within the comfort zone of every architect, it's critical. Real architecture has to involve real stakeholder engagement, otherwise architecture is just design with a corner office.

Why is it so important to prioritise "external" conversations over noodling? Because more and more, business agendas dictate integration, harmonisation/rationalisation and collaboration efforts which have unprecedented scopes. Business teams and IT teams have to work together like never before to make these initiatives succeed, and a key plank is to create a competency that can understand and drive the kind of global (as opposed to local) IT optimisations that will enable businesses to drive their agendas forward in the 21st Century.

In summary: in the context of 21st Century business, the critical EA competency is the ability to drive shared language and multiparty understanding—and conversations.