What are the key issues with enterprise architecture (EA) as a function?

The biggest issue I see is that it is lumped in with IT and ends up being a career pathway for solution architecture. The result is that EA roles end up being taken by people with a strong bent towards technology solutions.

Enterprise Architecture is about more than solutions, it's about piecing together the needs of the business with the technology that they need. This may not involve building, but may involve buying.

Enterprise Architecture should be down with IT, but it should not be done by IT 

The term “enterprise architecture” should go away; it's just general architecture. There are businesses spinning up today that are doing what enterprises are doing as well. It's the same architecture. We're building a lot of things in the cloud. There are some native things that come with that, like scalability and redundancy. You get all of that. It is just like security in particular. Having single sign-on (SSO) and all of those applications that you would normally consider enterprise architecture, is just general architecture today.

I've seen two types of enterprise architects. There are the ones that think they're God and they want you to do everything exactly within their framework. And that type of enterprise architecture is dead. I break IT down into three basic activities: design it, build it, run it. And I see the enterprise architect as the one that designs our future. There’s still a bit of spotting the guard rails involved, but I'm looking at it as an active role that's helping us find out where to go next. If you morph the role into more of a super solution designer, it becomes a proactive way to talk about how you build your future.

After seeing so many organizations that haven't done a good job of bringing it together, I’d say enterprise architecture (EA) is dead. And I've seen just as many companies that have gone way over the top with EA to the point that it's a constraining mechanism for the organization — people can't get things done because of the way that EA constructs things. It gets to a point where it's just bureaucracy more than anything. But it should be an opportunity to create that connective tissue or framework in which others can operate and innovate.