Making it work ("Politics") - doing "Do the right things"

The essence of real transition planning is not "good architecture".  It's...

Persuading those execs and budget holders who have "private agendas" to recognise the wider advantages of working in concert with the rest of the enterprise.

As just "a document", a transition plan is nothing more than a linked set (or sets of transition programmes, each with an estimated cost (based on an outline solution design) and benefit, sitting on a shelf somewhere...

So how to convince an exec from one division that their pet project is less critical to the enterprise than one from another division?

Governance.

Is a big topic in today's corporate climate - but usually governance of financial and legal behaviour.  But we're dealing with Architectural Governance, and we should be able to exploit the current focus... if we tackle it right - via a Corporate Architecture Board (whether central, federated, hierarchical or in some other form is a  question deeper than this blog) provides the executive decision making to underpin the EA inspired  "joined up" plan because of it's...

Sponsorship...

And here's the trick - if the CAB is composed of senior sponsoring execs and content-rich architectural advisors, the CAB (or whatever you chose to call it), provides the authority to direct, arbitrate and decide on the execution of the plan.

Why?  Because without sponsorship (and decent operational funding), EA will always loose to a tough battling exec (who will drive "I know what we need to do to get past the 'paper plan' and achieve our personal goals") who will always overcome the otherwise impotent-but-right EAer (whether they're called The Chief Architect or not). So sponsorship has to be...

...of the right kind

The biggest challenge of all.  So many (could it be 99%?) of these CABs are wholely staffed by execs and architects from the IT department, because historically EA has been all about IT.  This might be OK for infrastructure centric transition planning - it's "in the family".  But of course the enterprise's divisions have business centric plans that exploited IT, in ways that suit them... which immediately gives them the upper hand with an IT CAB when they say "what do you know about my business?", and therefore dismiss the IT centric attempts at governance.

Which is why an earlier post on Business Architecture is so vital. There, I discussed how critical it is for EA to embrace BA; but not just as a driver for IT (as discussed there), but as a source of business sponsorship, and therefore presence on the CAB.

Only when the CAB exerts business centric pressure can architecture's influence on enterprise transition planning.