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It’s no secret that many enterprise architects face a challenge when it comes to communicating what exactly they do, why it’s so important to their organizations, and the potential value enterprise architecture can bring to the future of the business.

Articulating the value is critical to getting organizational buy-in and seeing the real impact that great enterprise architecture — and the tools that enable it — can have on understanding how a company gets from where it is now to where its leaders ultimately want to end up.

So, what’s enterprise architecture anyway?

Enterprise architecture is essentially the process of analyzing and evaluating an organization’s business and IT capabilities with the goal of identifying ways to optimize performance and move a company from its current state to a desired future state. In other words, the enterprise architect is tasked with truly understanding the company’s business model and the elements necessary to deliver it, including people, processes, and IT.

That overview — modeling the organization as it exists today — is vital to understanding where the organization stands in terms of meeting business goals and strategies as well as metrics and KPIs. Without that holistic and data-informed understanding of the business and its dependencies — linking together everything from products, processes, departments, data, apps, and more — business leaders wouldn’t have the insight needed to understand the right changes to make to get to where they want to be.

Enterprise Architects Project the Future (No Crystal Ball Needed)

The goal of enterprise architecture is ultimately to enact effective and measurable change. Enterprise architects (EAs) do this by creating several alternative roadmaps that not only show how to get to the desired future state but also, through sharing metrics, prove how much better the organization will operate once the ideal roadmap is chosen and changes are made.

Enterprise architecture also plays a critical role in helping organizations understand the implications of the potential future paths they might go down. Architects can propose multiple solutions in line with changing strategies — all with a precise understanding of the tradeoffs that come with each potential scenario. These scenarios can be optimized for different business outcomes, like growth, cost optimization, risk reduction, etc., and ultimately drive critical business decisions with data-backed confidence. Modern EA tools go beyond old-school perceptions of enterprise architecture to move past simply visualizing to including dynamic data in the modeling of these future states in a scalable, collaborative way.

Driving Home the Value of Enterprise Architecture

It’s one thing to understand what enterprise architects do, but it’s another to have the right language on hand to clearly communicate the value of what they do across the business, especially to those outside of IT.

One overarching analogy that’s critical to explaining the impact EA can have is thinking of — and positioning — mature EA teams as bridge builders — making the connections between business and IT, strategy, and execution. When it comes to communicating the value of the EA role at each pivotal stage in the enterprise architecture process, here is some helpful language to keep in mind:

1. Understanding the Current State: Architects provide a data-driven overview of the organization’s entire ecosystem that enables stakeholders to confidently understand what they have to meet their objectives.
2. Getting from Point A to Point B: Enterprise architecture provides the knowledge that allows organizations to measure objectives with the exact knowledge of how far they are from delivering on those goals.
3. Preparing for a Constantly Changing Environment: With the right culture, data, and tools in place, enterprise architects also ensure the roadmaps they’ve created remain in sync with their organization’s change projects — and are at the ready to make adjustments if they start evolving at different speeds.

While the enterprise architect spends so much time understanding data and creating models, communication is the most important tool in the EA toolbox for enabling change in their organization. Enterprise architects can not only build bridges between teams but also between a company’s current state and its goal for the future — but only if the value of that work is effectively showcased.