Thoughts on CAEAP

Monday, June 22, 2009 |

I was honored to be invited to attend the kickoff meeting for the Center for Advancement of Enterprise Architecture Profession (or CAEAP for short). A lot of good ideas were discussed on how to harmonize the body of knowledge and training required for good enterprise architects. The problem is real - Enterprise Architecture programs have been one of the most consistent casualties of the current downturn, mainly as they are viewed as overhead and generally lack a standard way of communicating their value to the organization.

And yet, a highly functioning Enterprise Architecture capability is requisite for leveraging business process and technology assets in innovative ways to respond to internal and external pressures. Make no mistake, decisions on how to best utilize business processes and technology assets are made every day in every company. Most organizations simply cannot afford to wait months to gather the information to make a perfect decision. Without a formal knowledge management process and platform that ties all of the assets together, that discovery of information will always depend on few guru-level resources - not a very scalable approach - or will be relegated to the "we can't afford to wait or invest capital into discovery" paradigm.

Without Enterprise Architecture capabilities, that formal knowledge management process and platform cannot be created or sustainably operationalized. Without an advocacy body to harmonize the disparate threads and frameworks into a cohesive body of knowledge (a la PMBOK in Project Management), the cacophony of voices on how to best implement Enterprise Architecture capabilities can only degrade the value of EA message. This is why I believe that CAEAP's mission is crucial to Enterprise Architecture growth as a profession, and why I look forward to partnering with them to help them achieve their mission!

Aleks

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