EA Governance

It has been a while since I posted on this blog. This discussion initiated by Todd is of some interest to me and got me motivated to post this entry.

I had spoken at Open Group Conference, about the same. My presentation can be seen here (subscription required).

My concise picture of EA governance is as below.


The governance function of EA can roughly be divided into three broad categories, viz. legislating, ensuring compliance to legislation during execution and adjudicating the non-compliance.

When people talk about governance they mainly talk about compliance and adjudication, as pointed out by Todd. But for me the most important piece of governance is legislation . That is - when principles, policies, standards and references, which defines the compliance framework, are set. A broader community participation at this stage and a feeling of belonging, improves the compliance and lessens need for adjudication. Otherwise it appears that EA group is pushing its own agenda on practitioner community and practitioners actively resist such a push. Which leads to a lot of adjudication, requiring lot of management attention.

I am not saying EA legislation needs to be a totally democratic process and must follow democratic norms. But at the same time, it should not appear to be totally autocratic top-down process, thrusting legislations down practitioner's throat. In large IT organisation critical projects get caught in adjudication cycle and EA gets bad press precisely because legislation has not taken on board various points of views.

That reminds me of the role of free press. If we compare EA governance to civic governance, the piece that is missing is 'Free Press' or a communications function. It is a bi-directional communication channel which informs practioners of strategist's intent and allows practitioner's to report back their experiences from trenches to strategists, so that strategies can be suitably altered.

The social media is a good candidate for fulfilling all these functions. It can be utilised to empower the practitioner community to participate in legislation process and can also function as 'Free Press' so that bi-diretional communicaiton can take place between strategists and practitioners.