- 25 July, 2008 03:28 PM EST
- Poll Results: EA Communications Efforts
In our last poll, we asked: What percentage of available time/effort does your enterprise architecture (EA) team devote to communication? Here are the responses:
• Less than 10%: 31.8%
• 10% to 15%: 34.1%
• 15% to 20%: 25%
• 20% to 25%: 9.1%
The majority of clients spend 15% of their time/effort or less on communication. This is consistent with a survey done from 2006 through 2007 in North America and Europe, with a sample size of 250.
We performed regression analysis against the data from our EA program maturity self-assessment. If we can accept the hypothesis that higher EA maturity in our model equates to greater success, then the results from our initial analysis suggest that "developing and maintaining stakeholder sponsorship and support" was the most influential dimension of the model with respect to greater overall maturity. We repeated the analysis several times during the past two years and received the same result - developing and maintaining stakeholder involvement and support was the most-influential dimension of the model. Because the EA program maturity model was designed as an assessment and not a survey, we enlisted the help of a well-qualified statistician (Ph.D.) to review our analysis. Our statistician performed structural equation modeling. I won't go into the details, but the results were still consistent.
As a reminder, this dimension covers the following issues/areas:
• Corporate management support
• Business unit support
• IT support
• Architecture community support
• Architecture communication
This is insightful in and of itself; however, other surveys suggest that the average EA effort has waning support from various stakeholder groups and lacks appropriate soft skills in EA teams to address stakeholder support.
Bottom Line: EA success may hinge on how well stakeholders support and are involved with EA. Most EA teams have room for improvement. Re-evaluate the support for EA in your organization. Make changes to the team as needed to ensure that stakeholders maintain support for EA. Potential changes include training existing EA team members in soft skills (such as communication, organization change management, facilitation, persuasion and negotiation) and/or bringing in new team members who possess soft skills.
