The 10 Principles of Enterprise Architecture. Create a foundation of shared beliefs for guiding the use of IT in constructing, transforming, and operating your organization.EA principles are shared, long-lasting beliefs that guide the use of IT in constructing, transforming, and operating the enterprise by informing and restricting target-state enterprise architecture design, IT investment portfolio management, solution development, and procurement decisions. Without EA principles, IT management decisions are guided by either employees’ personal preferences or assumptions on how these decisions should be made. Lack of EA principles results in making ineffective decisions and higher governance effort required to control and correct them.Keep EA principles as short as possible, and limit their total number to 10. Every organization can benefit from a set of shared foundational beliefs – EA principles.

EA principles guide decisions on the use of IT across the enterprise. IT decisions that are informed by a shared set of guiding principles (as opposed to employee’s assumptions and personal preferences) require less IT governance effort and enable the organization’s cohesiveness in achieving both strategic and tactical goals.EA principles represent a key component of IT governance and should guide the development of domain-specific policies (e.g. security policy, procurement policy) that elaborate on particular implications of principles in specific process areas.

There is a silver bullet solution. Use Info-Tech’s 10 universal EA principles as a starting point.As counter-intuitive as it seems, most organizations can benefit from the same set of 10 universal EA principles developed by Info-Tech Research Group.

The rationale and the implications sections of each principle should be tailored to the organization’s specifics.

http://www.infotech.com/research/ss/adopt-10-universal-enterprise-architecture-principles