Enterprise Architecture Scoping

Looking closer to how enterprise architecture concepts has evolved during past several years, one can realize the whole story was around the scope of an enterprise wide plan.

Take Iranian market for example, it all started with IBM's BSP (Business Systems Planning) method offering by DPI (the Ex-IBM) around 15 years ago. BSP had a comprehensive approach on identifying and designing information systems for an organization; as expected, many of DPIs projects turned into never-lasting dilemmas; customers got frustrated and only small parts of plan got realized into software systems.

The idea yet was so promising that many companies and academic groups started rationalizing the key concept into more practical methods; this practice was generally called IT Master Plan. Interpretation of required figures to collect in an IT Master Plan was so diverse that you could find artifacts of a couple of hundred pages to several thousands coming out of exercise.

It was also an emerging trend toward business process engineering (re-engineering/redesign/refinement) with an intensive look at applications of IT in business consulting firms.

When Dr Shams in Beheshti University introduced Enterprise Architecture and later Dr Rahbar offered a more practical approach toward that in his bid on KWPA IT Strategy (2002) project, EA started to capture attention and the older methods started to fadeout.

Even though EA was trying to address several issues around its precedents, such as long exercise period and lack of direct strategy linkage; we saw several EA projects failing to meet deadlines, addressing the business and IT alignment, and providing a transparent portfolio of IT initiatives to the organization.

Beside some general factors that inhibit every project in Iran such as changes in management structure, improper budgeting, inefficient project management, etc.; there were one common problem with all failed projects: "Unclear Scope".

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