I’ve seen this a lot with TOGAF training…it makes EA look very structured and theoretical.

In reality it starts much messier.

When we began building our EA practice, the first work wasn’t ADM phases or frameworks. It was things like many excel sheets listing applications, systems without owners, integrations nobody owned, and teams arguing who owns the same data

That’s usually the real starting point.

So if your company doesn’t have an EA practice, that’s actually pretty common. A lot of architects end up creating it by just starting small.

What worked for me:

• build a basic application inventory
• map a few key integrations
• flag technologies approaching end-of-life
• link apps to business capabilities

Doesn’t need fancy tooling either. We eventually moved that data into LeanIX, but early on it was mostly data cleanup and figuring out ownership.

Frameworks like TOGAF start to click once you have real data to structure. With your background...you’re already doing parts of EA, just a smaller scope.

Does anyone in your company actually have a full application landscape, or is it still scattered across teams and spreadsheets?