EA sell

Selling the EA seems to be one of the issues continually confronting us in the EA arena. To sell it, start by identifying the interested and affected parties, the stakeholders. Ask the old question "what's in it for them?" and "what is the impact on them" since they would be asked to support or even contribute to it! 

Top management, what is in it for them? The representation of the Enterprise governance, the roles and responsibilities, governance bodies and principles of decision making, the business models - how the business makes a profit -, financial P&L centers mapping on business functions, strategy alignment to the Enterprise organization, regulatory compliance... There is quite a lot to sell. 

For Enterprise shared services organization: support functions as HR, Payroll� have to be described in terms of services, costs and effectiveness. 

For business people you should be providing information on other technologies like the SCADA and GIS for utility companies for instance. Or you should cover all business processes not only a few. If you provide this information the business organization would become your supporters. 

To satisfy the interests of most potential stakeholders, the concept of architectural viewpoint/view is crucial: a view satisfies the concerns or needs of a stakeholder group. There are as many views as stakeholder types. 

If you define your architecture in terms of applications, information and technology architecture you address an audience in IT for the most part, which audience is not too large. The potential audience depends entirely on the scope of your EA development which can vary a lot. Is your EA an IT only architecture? For IT, do you intend though to include content management, knowledge management, BI, DW�, integration architectures? That will considerably enlarge your IT audience. 

To sell EA I would put together, upfront, an EA drivers and benefits pack and a business case based on financial terms. Business management thinks in terms of Payback, ROI, NPV� which are measures of profit vs costs, typically applied to projects. A table of benefits, such as time to market, agility�, and the estimated EA contribution to them at each EA iteration will do a lot of good to the sales process of EA. 

The EA has to be planned to deliver first what the business needs (for instance a Single Customer View architecture). 

A natural progression to EA with obsolete systems and technologies replaced when the time has come and not before would reinforce the EA sell effort.