I just sat through a webinar from Forrester Research on a new service that they are offering. They can come into an organization and help an EA team figure out where they are and where they should go. It sounds like an interesting option to help an EA team define their go-forward direction. Gene Leganza has a lot of EA experience and I would trust his ability to help assess the directions of an EA team.

He seems to preaching that EA move up the ladder and get closer to the business. That's a pretty mature approach to Enterprise Architecture and I'm pretty confident that most EA teams aren't far enough along to get there yet. For a mature EA team, it makes sense. My opinion is that "younger" EA teams need to focus on the basic blocking and tackling first - standards, guiding principles, application inventory, project governance and guidance. Of course, the standards and guiding principles need to be aligned with the overall IT directions which need to be aligned with the overall business directions and the project work needs to be aligned with the PMO.