- 06 June, 2008 11:48 AM EST
- It's the People
Recently, we've seen a lot of interest around enterprise architecture (EA) certification and metrics. Although both of these add value, only a modicum of interest surrounds what appears to matter most — gaining and maintaining stakeholder involvement and support.
We've believed for many years that this was the most important component of a successful EA, and we have strong quantitative evidence to prove it. Our database of EA program maturity data continues to grow, and we continue to run regression analysis against it. We also continue to see that the most important dimension statistically, relating to overall higher maturity, is the degree to which an EA team can develop and maintain stakeholder involvement and support.
To that degree, when looking at how far EA teams have gotten with respect to developing and maintaining stakeholder involvement and support, it's not very far. When looking at the EA team makeup, EA teams appear to be woefully deficient with respect to "soft" skills — the type of skills that can be applied to developing and maintaining stakeholder involvement and support.
So, if I had my druthers, although EA certification might be interesting, I think I'd rather send the EA team to the Dale Carnegie course!
