Enterprise Architecture Maturity Level

IT Landscapes of an organization opens the window to the Enterprise architecture maturity of that particular organization. Going by the definition of the classic book " Enterprise Architecture as Strategy " (http://www.architectureasstrategy.com/) organization having multiple applications catering to local business functions without any technology standardization can be labeled as a maturity level one or business silo . Organization having technology standards and shared infrastructure can be termed as maturity level two or Standardized technology. While an organization moves from level one to level two, there will be significant reduction of IT cost due to fewer platforms to support. Organization with enterprise view of data and reduced data redundancy can be termed as maturity level 3. Investments change from local application to enterprise application and shared data. This can be also termed as an optimized core. When an organization got modular applications build on the optimized core it can be termed as maturity level four or Business Modularity. Through ‘Web services ‘ organization creates reusable business services at this level or create front end processes which connect to core data and backend processes. An Organization needs to move one level to another sequentially, jumping levels will not be a successful strategy as shown by the authors of the above mentioned book. This reflect perfectly in one of my recent interaction with an organization which was at a classic case of level one maturity. Management tries to push for a process standardization through an ERP system (optimized core) without a technology standardisation phase . There were political resistance, chaos and the entire project was heading towards failure.