What Does Successful Enterprise Architecture Look Like?
We’re often asked, ‘What does good Enterprise Architecture look like?’ and ‘What is best practice’ The truth is, there’s no single answer, because there’s no universal ‘best’. Ask a Michelin-starred chef how to cook the perfect steak and you’ll likely get several great steaks but based on different interpretations of the question. What works well for one organisation may not suit another, so instead of focusing on best practice, we prefer to talk about good practice.
Good Practice Depends on Organisational Needs
The key to understanding what successful EA looks like lies in understanding the needs of the organisation.
For one global organisation, the first success was as simple compiling a single list of all applications. The organisation had never had a single overview of their application estate, so had no idea what they had in place. The enterprise architects consolidated the firm’s global applications into a standard list, classifying what they did, and the CIO was delighted. The next milestone was understanding application costs and identifying where the business was incurring high spend before moving to a deeper rationalisation exercise. This current state visibility laid the foundation for future target state work.
For another organisation, success was found in identifying opportunities for application rationalisation. In a different case, it was about understanding the risk profile of the technology products underpinning business-critical applications—again, relatively basic steps, but ones that delivered real value. Both of these pleased the CIOs as they gave them insight into something useful that they previously didn’t have.
Elsewhere, success looked like EA being deeply embedded in the business change process, proactively advising on how change would impact strategic needs. In this scenario, enterprise architects operated as trusted advisors across both IT and business domains.
In short, what ‘successful’ looks like varies—it depends on the organisational context. The best way to determine success? Talk to your stakeholders. Understand what ‘good’ looks like to them, and work towards that.
So, What Might Good Look Like?
That said, we don’t want to shy away from offering a view. So, what does good EA look like? What might a target state for the EA function itself be?
In our view, one example of great EA is where it is embedded across the business, and ‘everyone is an architect’. A high-functioning EA team doesn’t just gather data or build catalogues—it helps shape strategic decisions and engages the wider organisation in enterprise architecture.
In this model, architectural information – by which we mean information on capabilities, processes, applications, technology, etc and their interdependencies – is not just documented but actively used to generate new proposals and ideas that feed into governance and change processes. These proposals are reviewed, prioritised, and integrated into strategic plans. Those plans, in turn, update the architectural view, creating a feedback loop.
This kind of joined-up architecture forms a virtuous cycle: the EA team maps the organisation, sets principles and standards, and delivers insights that guide change. That change updates the architecture. And so on.
So that is one version of good, but it is an ambitious journey, one that may take several years and needs careful navigating. It requires consideration as to where breadth of architecture versus depth in the architecture is required, and how the wider organisation will be engaged with the architecture.
There are other versions, again we talked in a previous blog about a very successful EA team that had no real engagement outside IT, but who were very highly regarded by the CIO as they helped shape IT in supporting the business needs.
In that case, success wasn’t about enterprise-wide engagement, but about delivering real value within the IT domain.
So, What Does Good Look Like?
Ultimately, there’s no single definition of what a good, successful Enterprise Architecture looks like—it depends on the unique goals and maturity of each organisation. What matters most is that EA delivers value in a way that resonates with stakeholders, aligns with strategic priorities, and supports meaningful change.
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