Is EA a solution or a cover-up ?

Recently, I have come to believe that EA doesn’t introduce anything new to “modern business management”. However, such an approach to management seems to be rare compared to "classic business management". Consequenetly, I feel that EA is a bad solution to a deeper problem : "classic business management". Classic management is based on a tacit assumption that organizations can be compared to machines. Consequently, divide-and-conquer strategies are promoted both in organizational design as well as task responsibility/accountability distribution. This is to be expected because most “classic” management principles date from the industrial revolution. The consequence of all of this is that “classic” management doesn’t take a systemic approach to management (I’m using the term systemic from the perspective of Senge, Demings, etc.). In addition, as stated by Peter Drucker, classic management is about doing things right, it isn’t about doing the right things… that’s leadership.

If I go off into fantasy land for a moment :o) If organizations were managed using a systemic approach, there probably won’t be a need for an EA team. The EA team would be replaced by a strategic leadership/management committee with representatives from across all units (IT would be one). These representatives would work in collaboration in order to insure systemic optimisation and organizational learning.

Now back to reality… because of classic management, these units often do not work in collaboration because, driven by a culture of silos, they fight for limited resource in order to do what they believe is “locally” right instead of working together in order to do what is “globally right”. This is also sustained by a tacit assumption that accountability cannot be giving to a group but only to a single person.

Now if a talk about IT and EA. EA is probably often in IT because IT is always “stuck” in the middle of all the other units fighting for limited resources. Consequently, for IT to function efficiently, it has to compensate for the silo culture… hence the need for an EA team. Often, business management doesn’t understand EA because understanding it would put into question there ways on managing/thinking.