EA Heuristic #5: Address the concern of “you are echoing back what I told you”

(this article is part of the series "12 Heuristics for Enterprise Architecting")

Stop parroting me! (photo credit: Ferran Pestaña) 

In some ways, the “as-is” phase of enterprise architecting exercises do not generate new content. It brings together observations from different parts of the organization and synthesizes them. Though the synthesis often produce “fresh” insights, these insights might seem obvious to the organization in retrospect, as they are often associated with pains that the organization has been suffering under. In our EA exercise, we received feedback on our “as-is” analysis that ranged from being “spot on” to “echoing back what I told you”, and that seem confusing until we sat down and analyzed the issue.

Learning from this experience, we could have explained to the organization why the EA team was not simply echoing back to them using the earlier mentioned logic. What we did do was to explain to them the EA methodology, and how we relied on it to systematically analyze the organization.