Dear Bob ... I'm considering adding a separate box to my org chart to handle enterprise architecture management. Do you have any tips or suggestions? - Insecure Dear Insecure ... It's hard to answer without knowing more about your organization. And, there are limits to what I can handle here - in Bob Lewis' IS Survival Guide I devoted about 100 pages to this subject, and it was an overview. Here are a few ideas Dear Bob …I’m considering adding a separate box to my org chart to handle enterprise architecture management. Do you have any tips or suggestions?– Insecure Dear Insecure …It’s hard to answer without knowing more about your organization. And, there are limits to what I can handle here – in Bob Lewis’ IS Survival Guide I devoted about 100 pages to this subject, and it was an overview.Here are a few ideas that might help: * Make sure you’re big enough. Small IT shops – say, fewer than 50 people – probably can’t support the overhead of a formal architecture management function, and probably don’t need to either. At this size, the CIO should be able to keep an eye on the architecture so it doesn’t get out of hand.* Don’t create a white-paper factory. It’s easy for architecture management to turn into an academic ivory tower, disconnected from the practicalities of delivering working technology to the business. The secret to this is …* Do staff the architecture function with IT professionals who have had to deliver working software, or operate real, functioning networks and data centers in previous lives. They also need to have a theoretical bent, know how to apply abstract methodologies to real-world environments and so on, but unless some of the staff, and especially the manager, have had to deliver working technology at some point in their careers, you’re at risk. * Do build architecture management into your applications processes. This should include “architecture impact statements” as part of the design phase and architecture sign-off as part of software quality assurance. And …* Charge your architecture group with creating a culture of architecture in IT, and in the business as well. Architecture is hard to justify, because real expenditures in current projects lead to theoretical savings of cost, time and effort in future projects. Accepting this logic requires a great deal of trust.* Make sure it works. We had a client who was, according to their internal PR, instituting a fully buzzword compliant middleware system to provide real-time integration of its legacy and best-of-breed point solutions. We found it was actually encapsulating old-fashioned spaghetti-style batch dump-and-load file-transfer interfaces inside the middleware. The new interfaces adhered to the spec, but missed the point entirely. There’s a lot more to the subject, but this should at least give you a start.– Bob Technology Industry