ABSTRACT
Tom Feichtinger is vice president of enterprise architecture at Waste Management, and prior to that he led enterprise architecture organizations at Dana Holdings and GM. In his view, enterprise architects often spend far too much time inventorying where they are now, rather than thinking through where they are going. “If the enterprise architecture team spends all of their time collecting and understanding what applications, platforms, data, and business processes they have, the group will add little or no value early on,” he says. “I remember a consultant once asking me ‘Why would you care about capturing your entire as is state? You are not going to use 90 percent of it for years,’ and then a little light bulb went on for me. I should spend more time thinking about where we are going, not where we are now.”
