Why Enterprise Architecture Still Struggles, And What Actually Fixes It
Most professions don’t spend their time explaining why they matter.
Auditors don’t debate the value of financial statements. Accountants don’t justify why the chart of accounts exists. These disciplines are accepted, understood, embedded in how organisations work.
Enterprise architecture? Still fighting for legitimacy.
After years in this field, I think I know why. And it’s not the reason most architects assume.
The Three Failures
Traditional EA has failed to deliver three things. Not because architects aren’t smart. Because the discipline evolved in the wrong direction.
1. A Clear Value Proposition
Most EA outputs are static: diagrams, models, glossaries, capability maps. Beautifully structured. Technically correct. Utterly ignored.
Here’s the problem: executives don’t make decisions from diagrams. They make decisions from narratives, scenarios, and insights. They need to understand consequences, trade-offs, and sequences. They need clarity, not completeness.
EA kept optimising for documentation when it should have been optimising for decision-making.
The shift: Architecture produces clarity, not artefacts.
2. A Connection to Outcomes
Architecture often documents what is instead of influencing what should be. The result? Beautifully modelled past states with no strategic impact. Reference architectures that nobody references. Target states that never arrive.
The missing link is capabilities: not just what the organisation has, but what it can do and what it needs to do differently. Capabilities are the bridge between strategy (“where are we going?”) and execution (“what do we build?”).
Without that bridge, architecture floats disconnected from both ends.
The shift: Architecture anchors directly to purpose, objectives, and value.
3. A Practical Way of Working
EA frameworks can be complicated, theoretical, or so academically pure that nobody knows how to apply them. TOGAF certification doesn’t teach you how to facilitate a room full of executives who can’t agree on what “customer” means.
The solution isn’t more theory. It’s better packaging, better stories, better ways of making architecture accessible to people who have real work to do.
The shift: Architecture becomes practical, visual, and human.
What Actually Works
The future of architecture looks different. It’s:
Modular: Capabilities become reusable building blocks, not monolithic structures.
Dynamic: Architecture adapts as the organisation learns, not just when someone updates a document.
AI-augmented: Knowledge graphs and inference engines detect patterns humans miss, at speeds humans can’t match.
Strategic: Anchored directly to purpose, objectives, and measurable outcomes.
Practical: Tools, stories, and visuals that everyone understands. Not just architects.
The Bottom Line
EA doesn’t need to defend its value. It needs to express its value more clearly and deliver it more dynamically.
When architecture becomes a strategic design discipline (not a documentation activity), it becomes indispensable.
That’s the work I do. That’s what escape velocity looks like.