Proven practice to get CxO approval for enterprise architecture process.

That’s work twice for me so it might help others. If you find yourself in a situation where CIO is willing to start EA process but the CEO don’t want even to hear about it don’t give up! There still something that you can do about it.

This tactic separates the process to two phases:

1)      Small and quick process backed up by the CIO and aim’s to spread to rumor around the enterprise. In that phase you cant do any business architecture and the Information technology will be partial. What I usually do is to collect all business requirements from existing documents and summarize them into the business architecture of that phase. Then I move to information architecture but the work is solely based on IT system analyst (no interviews or team with enterprise workers). The computational architecture is fully executed. This phase should be ended with presentation in front of IT group and other enterprise groups. This presentation usually spread the rumor and the CEO is willing to hear what EA is all about.

2)      After gaining the CEO support and workers assign to the architecture teams it time to start the procedure by the book. Take in account that your information and computation architecture will be change after the business architecture will be finished. It’s kind of duplicate process but it lead you to your target.