Best practices - based on Gartner's ten best/worst

Netting out best practices I seem to end up with:
1. Ground your EA in business strategy and context - the engage the right business people, appoaches and information
2. Focus on the value to be delivered - and get business sponsorship on that basis (not religously following academic EA Art/Language/Frameworks oriented at other EAs)
3. Have a broad plan - which outlines a set of iterations, and maturity levels to be achieved
4. Communicate to the business your plan - the value being delivered
5. For each iteration have manage delivery - as you would a project and measure the delivery
6. Operationalize governance - helping people work across the organization: facilitating, guiding, collaborating and supporting downstream activities and spending
7. Have competent people – communicating, facilitating, planning, organizing, engaging (as well as some technical understanding)
8. Focus on where you heading - future states and where you want to get to.
9. Use solutions to enable what you are trying to achieve.

This is based on: http://www.infoq.com/news/2012/04/Best-Worst-EA-Practices (why some paraphrasing)
Ten best practices
1. Ground your EA in business strategy and context.
2. Execute a Communications Plan – to the business outlining the value of planned EA developments.
3. Scope, phase and iterate - pragmatically
4. Manage each iteration like a Project – deliverables, resourcing, 
5. Start with the Business Strategy and Obtain Business Sponsorship
6. Do the future state before the current state – focus on where you want to get to.
7. Operationalize governance - helping people work across the organization: facilitating, guiding, collaborating
8. Measure effectiveness of the EA program
9. Track maturity 
10. Have competent people – communicating, facilitating, planning, organizing, engaging (as well as some technical understanding)

Ten worst practices:
1. No link to Business Strategic Planning and Budget Process
2. Treat "Enterprise Architecture" as if it were "IT Architecture"  
4. Lack of Governance
5. Focusing on the Art/Language rather than Outcomes – business outcomes should drive the efforts
6. Focusing on EA Frameworks – 90% of enterprise architects use a mix of frameworks and don't use them as cookbooks 
7. "Ivory Tower" approach - focusing on art/langauge/frameworks in an academic way with an inner circle of EA experts
8. Do not communicate and feedback
9. Limiting the EA Team to IT Resources – you should engage with business people
10. Do not measure effectiveness

Also 
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/Enterprise-Architecture-Must-Become-Business-Driven-Gartner/


“Focusing on a standard EA framework doesn’t work,” 

“In the past, EA practitioners focused on deliverables that were useful to enterprise architects but not valuable to senior management and/or did not respond to a specific business or IT need.“ - see also
http://enterprisesto.blogspot.co.nz/2012/06/leadership-is-required-for-management.html


“...The value of EA is not in simply ‘doing EA,’ but rather in how it can help evolve the business ..." -  see also: http://ict-tech-and-industry.blogspot.co.nz/2009/01/12-step-program-for-enterprise.html


Five types of deliverables suggested

1. “... Measurable deliverables that address specific business outcomes and work with other business and IT disciplines such as business process management, program and portfolio management, business information, finance and human resources to leverage their efforts and move to value-driven EA.”
2. " ... Actionable deliverables, which drive change and must have a direct relationship to business outcomes and stakeholder requirements and present senior IT or business executives with a decision to be made or a specific action to be taken that moves the business toward a future state. "
3. " ... Diagnostic deliverables, which include models, requirements and analysis tools that are designed to enable IT and business leaders to understand the impact of different decisions made in response to business disruption or business opportunity. ..."
4. " ... Enabling deliverables are composed of information that is collected; they provide input to diagnostic deliverables that represent the business, people, processes, information and technology ..."
5. " ... Operational deliverables are the artifacts that EA practitioners use to help them define, communicate and run their EA program. ..."