EA Frameworks

EA's obsession with frameworks muddies its goals and IMHO is the direct cause of the lack of success over the years BUT a framework does help new EA programs come to terms with what they have to do and when. For me it has always been as simple as:

1) Problem definition scope your iteration - get buy in, communicate communicate, communicate
2) Future state analysis (using 3 questions - to solve this business problem/execute this strategy how do I.......change the way I do business? manage and use my information? and then how do I change my supporting technology and solution portfolio?
3) Current state analysis - what have I already invested in that I can reuse?
4) Gap analysis - what is the change program we need to put in place - project definition, funding etc

I know this is a process view but EA is a business planning process - if you try and make it anything else it fails. I use Zachman to help me workout what constructs I can use to represent the future state/current state. I did my TOGAF 9 cert last year and found some things of interest in TOGAF but I don't think I would use much of it. I use the Meta Group approach (swallowed by Gartner and muddied with the addition of a framework view) which is loosely described above and find parts of PEAF and Agile EA useful.

I would never recommend to any new or existing EA team to follow a framework because they just don't help. Every problem space is different, every organisation is different and in most modern organisations we just don't have the time to execute a framework fully or architect the entire enterprise - we should focus on iterations and "just in time" EA efforts. Using EA in this way is much harder as you do not have the luxury of having a well understood/documented current state. You risk the iterations becoming their own silos and having a scattered team that must be aligned. BUT if you focus on planning to solve real problems or execute strategic objectives then you are heading in the right direction.

Let me just get on my soap box for a minute - Frameworks are the cause of one MAJOR problems with EA - CURRENT STATE is the responsibility of every manager and team leader in the organisation NOT the EA TEAM - make them accountable for documenting and sharing this information. Give them a way to do it and a method to share but don't take responsibility for it. If I am an infrastructure manager - say managing the data centre and I have no idea what I have in the data centre or how I am using it then I am a failure YET we architects seem to take on the responsibility of documenting this for managers in the organisation. If I am a call centre manager and I don't know my people and processes then I am a failure yet the EA team think they have to do this for the business managers.