Communication

The success of an Enterprise Architecture program and the architectures that it produces will depend largely on how well the program's worth is communicated to interested stakeholders. The very strategic nature of the work and its importance as a guide to ensure the strategies are executed, means that the program's outputs will be critical to a wide range of stakeholders from senior executives down to business and technology implementation teams.

The management of the Enterprise Architecture program should include a communication plan which identifies the important stakeholders who are impacted by the program's work, determines their needs and devises the best way of communicating with them, either as a group or as individuals. The communication plan will typically take the form of a document and while there would be an overall program level plan each architecture could have its own version of this plan which identifies the stakeholders affected by that work. The types of communication devices can include: formal or informal oral presentations, oral or written status reports, one page summary documents, walk-throughs, slide shows and one page diagrams.

Enterprise Architect has a wide range of tools that can assist with the development of the communication plan and the dissemination of information to stakeholders. The most obvious of these is to provide access to the repository so stakeholders can be directed to the parts of the model that are of interest to them. The Model Views facility can be used to tailor views that are relevant and meaningful to individuals or groups of stakeholders. The search facility can also be used to locate information in the repository for example the Applications supplied by a particular vendor or that have a particular sunset date.