We shouldn't forget that enterprise systems exist to support business objectives. At the highest level, long-term strategies are defined to meet the aims of an enterprise, including how it will compete and adapt to change. These strategies are implemented via business processes - either manually or, increasingly, as services in an SOA. As a business adapts to its commercial environment, so must its information systems. An agile business needs an agile IT infrastructure and traceability between the two. This is the realm of the Enterprise Architect.

The Institute for Enterprise Architecture recently published the results of their web-based survey of Enterprise Architecture trends for 2005. With just 79 respondents, mostly from the USA and Europe, the survey may not exactly be authoritative, but it does provide at least some indicators. There's plenty of information in the report but here are my selected highlights:

• The reasons why Enterprise Architecture is important to the respondents are in line with the oft-quoted benefits of investing in an EA. Support for decision-making, IT portfolio management, system development and managing complexity were the top answers.
• No less than 11 different EAFs were named as being in use, with the Zachman EAF being the most used framework in 2005 (perhaps due in part to their new 3-D EAF), having apparently gained a lot of ground at the expense of home grown frameworks and FEAF. The Open Group's TOGAF is the only framework to have steadily gained popularity over the last 3 annual surveys.
• MS Office and Visio are the most popular tools for Enterprise Architecture with Telelogic (formerly Popkin) System Architect leading a fragmented pack of dedicated tools. UML is the most popular system modeling technique and RUP the most popular system development methodology with XP taking 4th place, behind 'None' and 'Other' (!)
• Respondents mostly described their business areas as Government or Consultancy, with Finance coming in third.

My experience of Enterprise Architecture has been in working with the UK Police IT Organisation, PITO. PITO initiated developoment of an Enterprise Architecture based on the Zachman Framework about 5 years ago. A significant part of this work has been the development of a Corporate Data Model (CorDM) for the UK police forces to improve component re-use and interoperability between systems and services. Judging by the amount of investment by the US Government on FEAF and DoDAF, governments have definitely bought in to the idea of Enterprise Architectures and have the resources to develop and maintain the artifacts prescribed by them.

So, does anyone have experience of EA adoption in the private sector? Most speakers at seminars seem to come from the public sector. EAFs are promoted on the basis of improving the agility of the Enterprise but it seems that only those in relatively slow-moving domains stand a chance of being able to create and maintain a complete EA.

Does Scott Ambler's Agile Enterprise Architecture provide a reasonable balance between strict EA and the real world?