What is an EA Deliverable and How Do You Make The Palitable?

One of the biggest challenges faced by this EA team is – what is our set of deliverables? I am sure this team is not alone in this challenge.

Finding an appropriate set of deliverables can be a crippling challenge for many EA teams which why they resort to filling every cell in Zachman. My first question is when giver this challenge is always – “who are your customers?”

Once an EA team can define who are their customer then they can start to tailor theor deliverables to meet the needs of the various customer groups. Here are a few that come to mind:

1. Executive management
   1. Conceptual architecture diagrams showing in 1 page views future state versus current state. Try not to product large word documents of complex detailed diagrams
   2. Analysis of strategic intent – what does the strategy really mean – break it down to that next level so that planners in your organisation can begin to understand and flesh out the detail. The exec need to ratify this
2. IT management
   1. This is a tougher audience and I think maybe their primary deliverables is the current state architecture information – they need to own and manage this information so it must be designed in a way that makes this easy – think about portfolio management as a method for doing this
   2. IT standards and guidelines – the classic foundation pice for most EA teams – reference architectures.
3. Project teams
   1. This where you start to think about the more detailed deliverables that assist the execution of the EA future state by the projects.
   2. Logical level design documents
   3. Technical architecture domains, patterns, services – future state only
   4. Solution architecture documents – often developed in concert with the solution architects in the project teams

There will be many more “customers” with their own sets of deliverables – who would you say are your EA’s primary customers?