Scoping Enterprise Architecture - Part #2

You can find the introductory post on EA Scoping here

In order to properly outline the scope of an EA exercise, you should follow these steps:
1. Conduct several meeting with key business stakeholders, try to avoid IT department as they may bias your findings. You should try to understand what IT is doing and not doing for them, capturing their future requirements or "wishes" can also be beneficial.

2. Review your findings about common barriers and try to a.rationalize and b.prioritize them.

3. Identify which architectural components are the most important ones, an example of this activity is: when you find information sharing is a common problem, developing enterprise content architecture and information ownership models are probably the best bets to address this barrier.

4. Based on the components you need to develop, identify which EA artifacts you need to create. You may use your EA framework to pick those artifacts.

5. EA Artifacts tell you how you should tailor methodology to deliver them. once you had your methodology ready, you can start the "right size" EA project with confidence.

John Zachman and Iran!

One interesting comment from Zachman was about the number of emails he receives from Iran; I wasn't really surprised since there are a lot of EA projects going on Iran and if you check google trends labs, you will see Iran is one of the top locations that people google about EA.
He showed a few emails from Iranian fans, inviting him to go and visit Iran. Hopefully we will see him there soon...

Get your phone number in Iran

Although this post might look like a commercial, I believe it is valuable enough to mention.
Those fellows who were using Skype for their voice communications might be familiar with Skype-in service. With skype-in, you can buy your own local phone number and have it diverted to your skype messenger (for free) or any phone number in the world (at cost). Since the voice traffic is transmitted over the internet, it is cheaper than conventional international calls. The beauty of this service is the convenience it brings to people who wish to call you; they just use your local number without worrying about where in the world you are.
The unfortunate thing is Skype-in is not available in many countries so not everyone may benefit from this service.
I've recently discovered that a company has started offering same service in Iran. After the huge upgrade to Tehran's telephony infrastructure, there are enough directory numbers for everyone living outside of Iran to have their very own phone number.