Why Middle East and Indian Governments Are Repeating the U.S. Government’s Enterprise Architecture Mistake of 2000
- Sunil Dutt Jha
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Where Enterprise Architecture Went Wrong: When EA Became Just Technology Alignment
The early collapse of Enterprise Architecture thinking can be traced back to how it was institutionalized in the U.S. government through the Clinger–Cohen Act (1996) and the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) initiative.
The intent was reasonable: reduce duplication, improve accountability, and bring discipline to federal IT spending. However, the way EA was defined and operationalized created a long-term distortion.
By equating Enterprise Architecture with shared IT services across departments, EA was implicitly framed as an IT coordination problem, not an enterprise anatomy problem. Architecture became about identifying “common systems,” “shared platforms,” and “standard technologies,” rather than modeling how strategy, policy, processes, decisions, and operations actually differ—and must differ—across agencies and functions.
This is where the structural drift began.
Instead of asking:
What is the mission logic of each department?
How do policies translate into operational decisions?
Where do responsibilities, controls, and outcomes structurally reside?
EA practice gravitated toward:
Common data models
Shared infrastructure
Consolidated applications
Technology reference models
In effect, enterprise coherence was reduced to IT commonality.
Over time, this produced a predictable outcome:Departments continued to operate with fundamentally different mandates, rules, and decision cycles, while IT was forced to “standardize” over those differences. Architecture teams became compliance enforcers rather than enterprise diagnosticians. CIOs were held accountable for failures that originated in policy design, organizational structure, or operational logic—well outside IT’s control.
What began as a governance improvement quietly shifted EA away from its core purpose:making the enterprise itself explicit, legible, and structurally aligned.
That early framing still echoes today—across governments and industries—where EA is treated as a technology alignment exercise rather than a full enterprise anatomy spanning strategy, process, systems, components, implementation, and operations.
What Was Actually Happening in the U.S. Government
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the U.S. government was spending tens of billions of dollars every year on IT across hundreds of departments and agencies.
Congress and oversight bodies had one basic concern:
“We are spending a lot of money. We do not understand what we are buying. Explain it to us in a structured way.”
This is where large consulting firms—Accenture, IBM, Deloitte, and others—entered with multi-billion-dollar contracts, often running into billions of dollars and more over time.
The implicit ask to these firms was not abstract. It was practical:
Show us where the money is going
Show us what systems exist
Show us overlap and duplication
Show us how to control and standardize spend
So the firms did exactly what they were asked to do.
They created:
Inventories of applications
Infrastructure maps
Reference architectures
Technology standards
Compliance dashboards
These outputs were measurable, auditable, and easy to report upward.
But they did not explain how the government actually works.
They did not explain how policy intent turns into operational decisions. They did not explain why two departments with shared systems still fail differently. They did not explain where accountability structurally resides.
Enterprise Architecture quietly became the discipline of explaining IT spend, not explaining the enterprise.
Once that framing was accepted, it became institutionalized—and exported.
The 2025 Reality Check in the U.S. Government
Earlier in 2025, the U.S. government asked a blunt question to its largest IT vendors—the same firms managing platforms, systems, and programs that collectively cost billions of dollars every year:
“What exactly are you doing for us, and what value are you delivering that costs this much money?”
The follow-up requirement was even more revealing:
“Explain it to us in a way that even a 15-year-old can understand.”
That question should never have been necessary.
If Enterprise Architecture had been doing its job, the government would already have had a clear, shared explanation of:
how the enterprise works,
how decisions flow,
how policy becomes operations,
and where money actually creates outcomes.
The fact that this explanation had to be asked for—decades later—shows that Enterprise Architecture was missing as an enterprise discipline, even though “EA programs,” “EA teams,” and “EA frameworks” formally existed.
What the vendors could explain clearly were:
systems,
platforms,
tools,
and technology programs.
What remained difficult to explain was:
how the government actually functions as an enterprise,
why outcomes vary across departments,
and how billions in spend translate into measurable public value.
That gap is not a communication problem. It is not a vendor problem. It is not a storytelling problem.
It is an Enterprise Architecture failure.
And this is the most important point for governments in 2025:
If the U.S. government—with decades of EA practice and virtually unlimited spending—still had to ask this question, then Enterprise Architecture as practiced never explained the enterprise in the first place.
What Middle East and Indian Governments Are Doing in 2025 — Repeating the Same Mistake
What the U.S. government did around the year 2000 is exactly what many Middle East governments and the Indian government are doing in 2025.
The same definition of Enterprise Architecture is being reused. The same assumptions are being made. And in many cases, the same global vendors are involved.
Governments are launching national EA programs. They are mandating “whole-of-government” architectures. They are pushing shared platforms, shared clouds, and shared data.
And they are asking vendors essentially the same question the U.S. government asked:
“Explain our digital landscape. Make it common. Make it controlled.”
The vendors responding are often the same firms that built FEA-style models two decades ago. The outputs therefore look familiar:
Reference architectures, Capability maps, Technology standards, EA compliance frameworks.
The problem is not that these governments are digitizing. The problem is that they are repeating the same sequence.
They are standardizing technology before understanding enterprise logic.
The U.S. government took more than twenty-five years to realize that:
IT consolidation does not fix enterprise fragmentation
Shared platforms do not resolve policy conflict
EA framed as IT alignment cannot correct non-IT structural failures
Middle East governments and the Indian government do not have that luxury.
They do not have unlimited budgets. They do not have decades to absorb architectural mistakes.They do not have room to repeat a twenty-five-year learning cycle.
Yet they are replaying it—faster.
The warning is simple and structural:
If Enterprise Architecture continues to be defined as technology alignment, these governments will spend money they do not have to fix problems that do not originate in IT.
The U.S. government already paid the tuition.
There is no reason to pay it again in 2025.
Diagnostics Observation
The lesson from the last twenty-five years is not that Enterprise Architecture is unnecessary, nor that governments should avoid large vendors. The lesson is simpler and harder: when Enterprise Architecture is defined as technology alignment, it will always produce technology answers—no matter how sophisticated the diagrams or how large the contracts.
If Middle East and Indian governments continue to ask vendors to explain systems before explaining how the enterprise itself functions, they will inherit the same structural blind spots the U.S. government spent decades uncovering.
The mistake is already documented. The cost is already known. In 2025, repeating it is no longer a learning exercise—it is a choice.