Case Study: BestTop is a mid-size governmental department providing important services of a social nature to the population of a large territory. From the technology perspective, the organization can be considered as a late adopter of innovations and characterized by relative underinvestment in IT, which has certain implications for both its IT landscape and respective management practices. On the one hand, BestTops IT landscape is very heterogeneous and includes many legacy information systems and technologies some of which have been in use for decades. On the other hand, its IT-related management practices are also rather archaic. For instance, the relationships between business and IT leaders in the organization exhibit evident signs of us and them mentality, while new investments in IT are viewed by business mostly as a means to reduce costs of the existing operations. BestTop has a centralized IT department headed by the CIO and responsible for developing and supporting information systems for all its business units. The IT department employs around 140 specialists and consists of three main functions: architecture, development and service. The architecture function includes a few architects focused predominantly on specific IT solutions. BestTop previously tried to uplift the maturity of its EA practice and extend the scope of architectural planning beyond separate initiatives, but these attempts failed and respective architects had been made redundant. Then, the CIO decided to undertake another deliberate effort to evolve BestTops EA practice with the involvement of external consultants at OrangeIT. For this purpose, the organization engaged a rather well-known boutique EA consultancy (OrangeIT) to help initiate a full-fledged EA practice. The consultancy at OrangeIT formed a project team consisting of four architects specialized in different subject areas. This consulting team acted according to a detailed engagement plan agreed with BestTops senior IT leadership. The plan stipulated in which sequence and when exactly various EA artifacts will be produced. In total, consultants worked for 2-5 months, analyzed the organization, interviewed numerous stakeholders and developed all the EA artifacts specified in the plan. Specifically, they started from analyzing BestTop in terms of current and desired maturity of its business capabilities and mapped existing applications to respective capabilities. Then, they captured all relevant data entities, documented all technologies used in the organization, depicted current and defined target application portfolios and created more detailed CRUD (create, read, update and delete) relationship matrices. If you are Head of EA team at OrangeIT that BestTop engaged; based on the case study above and EA lecture notes 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5:

1. Discuss five possible reasons why previously attempts to uplift the maturity of its EA practice and extend the scope of architectural planning beyond separate initiatives failed initially and what could be done to ensure that the evolvement of BestTops EA practice with external consultants would have a successful implementation of BestTops EA practice

. 2. Discuss four types of Enterprise Architecture Domains that you will implement first and why you considered the four domains to be most important to BestTops EA practice

3. BestTops team suggested that OrangeIT should implement Diversification EA operating models for them. However, your team at OrangeIT recommended that Coordination EA operating model should be implemented for BestTop. Discuss 4 reasons why implementation of Coordination EA operating model is key to the success of BestTops EA practice

4. Discuss 5 (five) key roles that Designs as an Enterprise Architecture artifact will play in BestTop.

5. Discuss how Vision and Standard could be used at BestTops if OrangeIT successfully implements of BestTops EA?

6. Discuss 4 types of IT initiatives that you have considered very important to BestTops EA

7. Describe the role of the 4 stakeholders in the EA implementation and BestTops EA practice