Posted by: Florian
In our office we have a piggy bank for whining. Every time someone complains/whines, he has to put 5$ into the bank.
The complaining from the EA folks has been particularly strong lately. After several years of studying bits and bytes and documenting information, all these business people come into that game now and playing buzzword bingo doesn’t work anymore, or at least not as good as it used to, because these guys (and girls…right) actually know what they want….
So I thought it is time -finally- for a paradigm shift and therefore I carved out 3 minutes of my busy day and (re-)invented the 10 commandments.
There you go and please don’t ask or comment, just do as He tells you 
The Ten Commandments for Enterprise Architects
1. EA (If applied correctly) is the best discipline to drive and to facilitate change, do not believe you can accomplish the same with other concepts.
2. Do not believe that you can achieve what you need to achieve by yourself. You are depending on the input of other people in your organization and their opinion is as valid and their requirements are as important as yours.
3. Do not pretend to be an Enterprise Architect, if you are looking only at IT, or any other discipline in an isolated manner. You might set-up your entire company for failure for many generations to come.
4. Take breaks in between your work and use them to reflect on what you have accomplished, to look at your results from a little distance and to apply your “outside the box” common sense.
5. Cherish the values of your organization and try to make your designs reflect these values to develop a sustainable future state with actionable iterations.
6. Do not misuse EA as an excuse to lay-off people (or any other evilness)because you think that this will create value and justify your existence. Rather use your gained insight to help people to develop into the right roles.
7. Do not flirt (or worse) with other disciplines. Take notes of their existence and cherish their capabilities. EA is the main discipline to connect the dots, not to confuse them.
8. Do not even pretend that all the knowledge comes from you. Honor your contributors and make them feel important to receive their support going forward.
9. Do not manufacture your gathered intelligence to achieve any quick wins. This will back-fire and jeopardize your entire plans.
10. Grant others their existence, do not try to rule the world by claiming things that do not belong to you. A business strategy might –and ideally should- be supported by your insight, but it should not be created by you.
Please tell me what you think and work with me on some guiding principles that people could use that -like us- want to bring EA to the next level.
Like this a lot, Florian!
Florian,
from the get go this gets my vote just for being written up in plain English; without any jargon or weasel-words. If more EA’s communicated their thoughts as directly and clearly as this I think there would be less discussion about its value.
99.5 (I took half a point off for “going forward”)
Thanks.