If you’re wondering how to balance traditional enterprise architecture (EA) frameworks with modern, API-first, cloud-native governance requirements, you’re in the right place. We’ll walk you through what enterprise architecture governance looks like in a contemporary context, and the best practices you need to implement and manage it effectively. Welcome along.
What is enterprise architecture governance?
Implementing enterprise architecture processes and practices is one thing. Governing them is quite another. This ongoing architecture governance requires a long-term commitment. It ensures your EA governance aligns with business strategy and enforces the EA standards that enhance decision making, improve organizational outcomes, support more effective risk management, and optimize your use of resources. For more on the benefits of enterprise architecture, head over to our post looking at what EA is and why you need it.
In terms of an enterprise architecture governance definition, there are plenty of comparisons to API governance. API governance sets the policies and processes that standardize API creation and operation, then maintains those standards on an ongoing basis. Enterprise architecture governance does the same for your architecture, aligning it with business strategy and goals while setting and maintaining policies, practices and standards. These span your entire business, including your data, application, and technology architecture.
This governance of enterprise-wide standards requires engagement across the business to be effective. Stakeholders in all departments must to commit to supporting the flow of information that makes such governance possible. It is not solely a tech concern or a leadership approach, but an EA governance model that requires buy-in at every level.
Distressingly, research by Bain & Company has found that only 10% of companies are satisfied with their company’s enterprise architecture capabilities. This feels like a huge missed opportunity, given the gains that a well-implemented and governed enterprise architecture can deliver. As Bain points out, companies with modern EA practices and processes have higher operational productivity. They are also better at business transformation, thanks to the greater agility and flexibility that their EA governance structure supports.
With this in mind, let’s consider some of the challenges of modern EA governance, before we dive into the enterprise architecture governance best practices that will help your business excel.
The modern EA governance challenge
Modern enterprises are complex for a whole range of reasons, meaning EA governance must overcome plenty of challenges before it can be effective. Let’s look at a few of the issues that can reduce the chances of architecture governance process success.
Traditional monolithic architectures vs distributed systems
Monolithic architectures had the benefit of clear ownership and change control, making them easier to fit into EA governance processes than modern, distributed microservices environments. The highly dynamic nature, cross-service dependencies and multi-team ownership of microservices are harder to govern, presenting a challenge to those tasked with enforcing standards.
The API-first economy and microservices proliferation
As microservices have proliferated, alongside API-first products, many businesses have experienced problems with microservice and toolchain fragmentation, platform sprawl, and integration spaghetti. Without robust API governance in place, including standards for security, documentation, monitoring, versioning, and more, such ecosystems become brittle, inconsistent, inefficient, and less reliable. This can make applying EA governance more challenging.
Multi-cloud and hybrid architecture complexity
Adding to modern complexity are multi-cloud and hybrid architectures. Implemented for a whole range of positive reasons, these are nonetheless a challenge for enterprise architects. Architecture governance must span multiple vendor-specific toolchains and clouds, as well as on-premise deployments, making everything from policy enforcement to visibility harder.
Shadow IT and decentralized development teams
On the people front, decentralized teams can make the EA governance process more of a challenge. Teams these days move fast, spinning up APIs, cloud services, and tools to meet specific needs as they accelerate business innovation. However, doing so without central oversight (such as robust API governance) can lead to inconsistencies and greater risk exposure, which EA governance must address.
The compliance and data governance burden
Any business that must comply with GDPR, HIPAA, SOX, or other regional or industry-specific regulations, will know the pain of balancing rapid innovation with seamless compliance. With data flowing across different services, regions, and vendors in modern, distributed ecosystems, governing data and systems in a way that ensures compliance while also remaining agile isn’t easy. It means applying an architecture governance process that’s embedded into the API and software delivery lifecycle, for example through policy as code. That’s no mean feat for an EA governance team to achieve.
Architecture sprawl and technical debt accumulation
We already touched on the sprawling nature of modern architectures, where it’s all too easy for services to overlap, APIs to duplicate functionality, and standards to drift. This can lead to mounting technical debt that reduces agility and efficiency, drives up costs, and makes it harder to implement an EA governance model successfully.
Balancing innovation velocity with governance requirements
Another challenge that modern enterprises present is the need for speed. Technological progress means being first to embrace the latest shiny thing and get to market can deliver significant rewards. However, the testing, reviews, approvals, and documentation of governance processes – if they aren’t well implemented – can put the brakes on progress. To counter this, modern architecture governance must work with this need for speed and agility, rather than against it. This is where automation, self-service guardrails, design templates, and other tools that support developer creativity and position governance as an enabler come in. Embracing them can require cultural change that challenges traditional perceptions of governance as a blocker.
Observability and visibility gaps
Strong enterprise architecture governance relies on having clear visibility of the architecture in question. Modern environments that don’t have centralized visibility make this a challenge.
Enterprise architecture governance best practices
Despite the challenges laid out above, it’s entirely possible to achieve enterprise architecture governance success. Adhering to the following best practices will set you well on the path to doing so.
Align EA governance with business strategy, not just IT strategy
Enterprise architecture governance is about much more than your IT strategy – it’s about strategic alignment with overarching business goals and direction of travel. That means putting processes and behaviors in place that connect architecture decisions to business outcomes, not just IT strategy outcomes.
To support this, establish clear value metrics that ensure you can measure progress towards business goals. Such metrics span business alignment and strategy execution, cost optimization and efficiency, risk management, security, compliance, innovation and agility, stakeholder satisfaction, architectural health and resilience, and more.
Adopt a federated governance model for modern distributed systems
Federated governance is not a new concept – it’s something that forward-thinking businesses have already implemented for their API management. The same can be done with an EA governance model, with enterprise-wide standards balanced with domain autonomy.
Applying this “just enough governance” philosophy is the ideal way to enforce the practices and standards you need while also enabling team agility and rapid innovation. Key to its success is understanding the pain points that different business domains face and their individual needs and challenges. Stakeholders from every domain should therefore be part of enterprise architecture planning, as well as regular reviews to support its ongoing maintenance and success.
Create architecture guardrails, not roadblocks
Linked to the above point is the need to create guardrails instead of roadblocks when it comes to your EA governance structure. This is one of the key enterprise architecture governance best practices to adhere to for ensuring team buy-in to the idea of governance as an enabler.
To achieve this, you’ll need reference architectures and templates, along with self-service capabilities that have governance built in. Use governance to make people’s lives easier in this way, and they’ll happily follow the golden paths and paved roads you’ve so carefully laid out.
Integrate governance throughout the architecture lifecycle
The earlier you can embed governance in the architecture lifecycle, the better. It’s a concept that API developers will be familiar with, with many modern organizations already having shifted security left to achieve greater consistency in API security and protection.
Shifting EA governance left, in tandem with a continuous compliance mindset (as opposed to periodic reviews), can support ongoing strategic alignment. Embedding governance standards in CI/CD pipelines will further support this, as will a focus on automation and self-service.
Leverage automation and tooling
Speaking of automation, there is much that you can achieve by leveraging the latest tooling when implementing automated EA governance. From automated compliance checking to architecture modeling and visualization tools, you can build structures that abstract governance concerns away from manual daily tasks. Doing so not only enforces your enterprise architecture governance best practices but also streamlines operational efficiency. Policy-as-code implementations are instrumental in achieving this, while real-time monitoring and alerting ensure that any breaches of required standards are not only flagged up but can be addressed immediately. The real-time nature of this is fundamental to EA governance as an enabler, instead of a barrier.
Establish clear, measurable governance metrics
Establishing the right metrics enables you to measure the success of your enterprise architecture governance. It can also help flag up any areas that need attention. Relevant metrics should touch on all areas impacted by your EA governance model. This includes architecture compliance rates, time-to-market improvements, technical debt reduction, architecture reuse metrics, and more.
Embrace API governance as foundational to modern EA
APIs underpin not just connectivity but efficiency, agility, scalability, security, visibility, and more in modern enterprises. As such, the way you govern them is foundational to the success of modern EA governance. API governance frameworks that sit within an EA context maximize your ability to tie systems and products into your business strategy and goals. Central to achieving this is your API gateway, delivering runtime policy enforcement that flows throughout your APIs and backend services.
Foster an architecture governance culture
Governance isn’t merely a technical undertaking; it’s also about people and processes. As such, you need to foster an architecture governance culture that takes your teams along on the journey. There are various components to this, starting with stakeholder consultations and encompassing regular training and enablement activities as part of an ongoing program.
Also essential are architecture communities of practice. These ensure that staff have somewhere to turn to for guidance and swift resolution, should they run into any bumps along the road when it comes to complying with your EA governance processes and standards. At the heart of all this, as with all effective communication and collaboration, is transparent decision-making. If your people can clearly see why they have to do things a certain way, and if you’ve consulted them about the need to do so, you’re already well on your way to long-term EA governance success.
How to measure enterprise architecture governance success
We touched on having the right metrics above. Let’s break this down a bit to look at some of the metrics you might find useful in measuring enterprise architecture governance success and ensuring your achieve value from your governance model on an ongoing basis.
- Architecture compliance and health metrics: An example of this is business capability coverage, which examines how well your architecture supports your core business capabilities. Others include architecture sprawl metrics (such as the number of integration points and the number of duplicate technologies), and the enterprise’s system interoperability score.
- Business value metrics: Examples of these include time-to-market for new products and capabilities that EA has enabled, and the percentage of projects aligned to enterprise strategy.
- Cost optimization and efficiency metrics: These include cost reduction metrics such as licensing savings and reduction in redundant systems, as well as percentage of technology reuse, and cloud cost efficiencies such as cost-per-transaction and cost-per-user.
- Risk, security, and compliance metrics: Examples include the percentage of systems covered by security standards/zero-trust policies, audit findings reduction rate, resiliency metrics such as mean time to resolution (MTTR) and disaster recovery readiness, and reduction in regulatory compliance gaps.
- Innovation enablement metrics: Innovation and agility metrics include service API development duration (from concept to deployment), the adoption rate of modern architecture patterns, the percentage of innovation experiments that go on to scale successfully, and the percentage of reusable APIs and/or services leveraged as part of new projects.
- Stakeholder satisfaction measures: These metrics include business stakeholder satisfaction with EA guidance and processes, developer satisfaction with guardrails and EA-provided platforms, and the number of teams using (and reusing) EA-provided reference architectures and templates.
- Architecture debt metrics: These relate to technical debt reduction measures such as rationalization initiatives and lifecycle management.
- Governance maturity assessment: Metrics in this area range from the percentage of initiatives reviewed through your EA governance process to the extent of your policy as code coverage. They also cover decision-making efficiency, through metrics such as the average time to complete an architectural review/approval and the MTTR for architectural non-compliance issues.
What are the best practices for enterprise architecture governance?
The best practices for enterprise architecture governance include aligning governance with business strategy, adopting federated governance models, providing guardrails instead of roadblocks, embedding governance throughout the architecture lifecycle, leveraging automation, defining measurable governance metrics, strengthening API governance, and fostering a culture of governance. Together, these practices ensure EA governance supports agility, compliance, and business outcomes.
Who benefits from EA governance best practices?
CIOs gain better strategic alignment, architects reduce technical debt, and developers get faster innovation through guardrails.
What’s the difference between EA governance and IT governance?
The main difference between EA governance and IT governance is focus. EA governance manages enterprise architecture to align business strategy with technology standards, frameworks, and long-term design. IT governance manages IT operations, resources, risks, and compliance to ensure technology supports IT strategy and business objectives effectively.
Get ready for enterprise architecture governance success
Implementing and managing enterprise architecture governance effectively can unlock untold efficiencies across your business, leveling up organizational performance while optimizing resource use and costs. The Tyk team is here to help with all your architecture governance needs, so why not arrange a time to speak to our experts? You can also trial Tyk for free to enjoy a hands-on experience of our platform.