This gets at something important. The legibility problem is real, but I think it's solvable -- if EA is willing to make a structural shift in what it actually owns.
If EA takes genuine ownership of value chain design -- capability boundaries, principles, guardrails -- rather than drifting into implementation advisory, it can start building an evidence trail that executives do understand. TCO trends over time. Capability consolidation. Reduction in cross-boundary friction. Those are outcomes that show up in numbers, even if slowly.
The difficulty is that most EA functions drift toward implementation because that's where urgency lives. Once you're inside delivery, you've lost the vantage point the boundary work requires. You become a contributor to the system rather than the designer of it.
The transition isn't primarily a communication challenge. It's a scope challenge. EA needs to stay upstream -- designing the system that delivery runs on, and then holding that design accountable over time. That's what makes the value visible. Not packaging it differently, but producing a different kind of output in the first place
Great points. EA ownership is indeed a challenge in many organizations. In my view, the real ownership of EA should sit with executive leadership, while the EA function owns the practical work. As you describe, EA often ends up interacting mainly with individual projects, where the urgency lives. But the real impact would come from staying more upstream—participating in strategic planning and development decisions.
I have rarely felt so "seen" when reading an architecture blog post. Thanks for this, it really resonates. Not necessarily regarding the "compensation" (in my industry) but certainly my concerns regarding EA buy in from executives and the like.
I appreciate that, glad it resonated! Executive buy-in is one of the hardest parts of EA. Not because leaders are uninterested, but because architecture value is indirect and rarely packaged in the language they naturally respond to. Good to hear the compensation isn’t the issue 🙂
This gets at something important. The legibility problem is real, but I think it's solvable -- if EA is willing to make a structural shift in what it actually owns.
If EA takes genuine ownership of value chain design -- capability boundaries, principles, guardrails -- rather than drifting into implementation advisory, it can start building an evidence trail that executives do understand. TCO trends over time. Capability consolidation. Reduction in cross-boundary friction. Those are outcomes that show up in numbers, even if slowly.
The difficulty is that most EA functions drift toward implementation because that's where urgency lives. Once you're inside delivery, you've lost the vantage point the boundary work requires. You become a contributor to the system rather than the designer of it.
The transition isn't primarily a communication challenge. It's a scope challenge. EA needs to stay upstream -- designing the system that delivery runs on, and then holding that design accountable over time. That's what makes the value visible. Not packaging it differently, but producing a different kind of output in the first place
Great points. EA ownership is indeed a challenge in many organizations. In my view, the real ownership of EA should sit with executive leadership, while the EA function owns the practical work. As you describe, EA often ends up interacting mainly with individual projects, where the urgency lives. But the real impact would come from staying more upstream—participating in strategic planning and development decisions.
I have rarely felt so "seen" when reading an architecture blog post. Thanks for this, it really resonates. Not necessarily regarding the "compensation" (in my industry) but certainly my concerns regarding EA buy in from executives and the like.
I appreciate that, glad it resonated! Executive buy-in is one of the hardest parts of EA. Not because leaders are uninterested, but because architecture value is indirect and rarely packaged in the language they naturally respond to. Good to hear the compensation isn’t the issue 🙂