Building an enterprise architecture step by step

For most organizations, getting started may be the hardest part of building an enterprise information technology architecture. One reason is that people have only a hazy idea of how to use a systematic architecting process to achieve specific goals. The entire idea of enterprise architecting seems grand and out of reach, so they feel more comfortable chipping away at it with patches. Unfortunately, these patches evolve to something only slightly more sophisticated. Some efforts never get that far. The architects get caught in a never-ending series of analyses and end up with nothing but a long to-do list just as the money runs out and the CEO expects to start seeing a return on investment. The article shows how to scope the project, set up the development team, and form a target architecture vision.