Enterprise Architecture for SMBs
Small and medium sized businesses often believe that they cannot afford to set up an EA organization, and they are usually right. What they can do is get a basic understanding and awareness of EA practices with our training program, distribute key roles needed for EA within their organization with our mentoring and working session approach, and jump start the process by identifying and creating pictures that guide and document crucial architectural conversations.
Chateaux offers instructor-led training on Enterprise Architecture and each of its major domains. We use examples gleaned from our engagements, as well as a workshop approach that creates and uses examples from your enterprise. We address what enterprise architecture is as we focus on how to use it effectively within an organization. This typically precedes working with you to assess your EA maturity, helping you to reach realistic conclusions about whether your organization should increase your EA effort and, if so, what areas should receive more or less attention.
During our long tenure in application design and delivery, we have created, as part of our methodology, purposeful additions to the work product. In this mode, we work directly with IT and business stakeholders to ensure that our Lean EA component makes a positive contribution to software development projects and business improvement initiatives. To do this, we add Lean EA structures from conception and definition through to delivery, support, and monitoring. We ensure that Lean EA contributes to our projects, making them better, faster, and cheaper. But as important, we ensure that projects appropriately contribute to the Lean EA initiative. We work directly as architects and facilitators, mentoring your people in selected roles, helping them to be prepared to take on these roles internally. The pace of this transition is up to you.
EA must be scaled properly to your enterprise. Being selective about which pictures are maintained as part of your EA may be the most important long term success factor. Many organizations attempting to implement EA, do not ask for help until their third try. They learn the hard way that EA can fall flat if the effort is not properly focused, adequately agile, or done to excess. Our approach focuses on creating the smallest number of pictures that will do the job, and reusing them to the extreme. This greatly increases the probability that when you pull up a picture, it will be current and accurate.
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