Why America’s Enterprise Architecture Collapsed into Dashboards, Workflows, and Compliance Checklists
- Sunil Dutt Jha
- Sep 28
- 3 min read
Enterprise Architecture was born in America. John Zachman gave it shape. In thirty years, the market hollowed it out.
Instead of Anatomy, America got slides. Instead of enterprise anatomy, America got IT blueprints. Instead of connecting strategy to operations, America got dashboards, data lakes, workflow engines, and compliance paperwork.
And when that failed, America shipped the mess offshore for cheap labor.
The Drift
Consulting firms needed billable scale. EA became IT governance + tool rollout. Gartner sold maturity charts. Accenture sold frameworks. IBM sold toolchains. Every large enterprise bought the kit ..and called it “architecture”
Vendors sold plumbing as enterprise design. Dashboards became ..“transparency” Data lakes became ..“architecture” API gateways became.. “integration”
Compliance became the safety net. SOX, HIPAA, SEC, DoD templates were rebranded as ..“governance” Paperwork passed. Structure never existed.
Outsourcing finished the job. Millions of jobs shipped out. Labor arbitrage saved a few billion. Structural design was abandoned.
The Illusions
For three decades, these were celebrated as “EA success”:
Dashboards = transparency
Data lakes = architecture
Workflow engines = reform
Compliance templates = governance
Vendor frameworks = strategy
Low-code = agility
TOM slides = operating model
AI pipelines = maturity
Portals = transformation
Digital twins = enterprise coherence
All useful. None of them architecture.
The Costs
M&A Trillions Destroyed
In 30 years, US companies announced over $30 trillion in mergers and acquisitions. By every serious study, 70–90% failed. That’s more than $20 trillion of enterprise activity destroyed.
Boards were told the failures were ..“culture” ....they were not.
The failures were structural: P1 strategy never connected to P2 processes, P3 system behaviors, P4 components, P5 implementation, or P6 operations.
Outsourcing Trade-Off
Since the 1990s, millions of jobs were offshored. Each job saved $30–50k a year. Maybe a few hundred billion saved annually. Against that, trillions in enterprise value were destroyed.America traded trillions in structure for billions in labor arbitrage.
Growth Slowdown
1960s–1980s: GDP growth ~3.5–4%.
1990s: ~3%.
2000s–2020s: ~2% or less. IT spend exploded. Consulting spend ballooned. Outsourcing boomed. Growth collapsed. Competitiveness eroded.
Banks vs Defense: IT Spend Without Structure
US banks spend more on IT than the Pentagon spends on defense technology.
JPMorgan Chase: $17B/year.
Bank of America: $12B.
Citi, Wells, Goldman: $8–10B each.
Total: $150–200B annually.
That is larger than the Department of Defense’s tech modernization budget.
What does America get for it?
Thousands of duplicate systems.
Customer records scattered across silos.
Billions to keep the plumbing alive.
“EA Programs” reduced to PowerPoint maturity models.
Thirty years of spend. Hundreds of billions.
And still: no single coherent view of a customer, a product, or an account.
This is what Enterprise Architecture became in America: the most expensive IT budget in history with the weakest structural results.
The Diagnostics
That is why, at ICMG we built the USA120 Diagnostics (120 Industry EA Diagnostics).
Not a framework. Not a toolkit. A mirror.
120 cases across public sector, healthcare, finance, telecom, energy, retail, transport, real estate, sports.Each case shows:
What was celebrated.
What was missing across P1–P6.
Where each role — CEO, CIO, Sales Head, Chief EA, Ops Head — was blind to the structural gap.
The Challenge
Enterprise Architecture was born here. Why did America collapse it into dashboards, workflows, compliance templates, and outsourcing deals?
Who benefitted? Vendors. Consultants. Offshoring shops.
Who paid? American enterprises. Industry by industry. Product by product. Global leadership lost.
That is the story of the last 30 years. That is why the USA120 Diagnostics exist.
