Developing the "Enterprise Context"...while my kitchen's on fire!

While reading the Gartner research paper "Q&A: Why EA Needs an Enterprise Context," a concern implementing this process across different companies/organizations. To start, I do not disagree with any of the process and believe it provides some of the best academic information on the topic.  However, I feel there are two factors that confound implementing this process: 1) organizational maturity, and 2) business motivators.

This Gartner paper presents a process for establishing the "enterprise context" of an organization or business entity, meaning:

"The enterprise context is the process of: 

• Identifying internal and external environmental trends 
• Articulating the business strategy
• Identifying requirements 
• Creating principles 
• Developing anchor models of the business"

The six-step process is a key initial process once the EA program is in place and contain straight-forward steps with logical flow. What gave me pause is the fact that my experience tells me these six steps will vary widely in terms of time and resources required based on the level of organization maturity.  As a basis of experiential support, two current efforts come to mind which differ significantly in terms of IT and organization maturity.  

The first organization is a government organization that has a defined EA framework and hundreds (if not thousands) of IT resources and programs. Some resources are in “steady state,” an unchanging “as-is” environment, while some resources are in transition, with that transition being managed through funded programs of different resource sizes and time horizons.  Obviously, this organization is mature with a lot of moving part.  However it's EA program is still new, and the complexity of getting a handle on this context will be tremendous.

The second organization is a new, for-profit entity, a fledgling enterprise with minimal resources and three primary IT programs, two still in their initiation stage.  This organization is very immature with few moving parts. The EA context is minimal, excepting the need to understand external, competitive forces to gain insight on where more mature competitors are in terms of resources and past/on-going programs (current products).

The process set in the article can work for both.  However, the time horizon for completing the information will greatly differ, and that is the issue: will the more mature organization have the patience to wait through the process?  My experience tells me that mature organizations are less patient because they are trying to balance operational crises while also trying to handle the “distraction” of strategic planning.  The younger company is willing to go through the process because they see it makes sense and they have fewer resources (which makes it faster). They also see tangible early value faster, meaning each discovery has a much greater ROI for this organization.  Whereas the more established organization, an analogy I heard is, “So, you are asking me to help plan for a new roof while the kitchen and living room are on fire?”  

This issue leads to the question: how do we (as EA practitioners) handle the need to support the operational requirements of a business leader while also trying to coax them to be more strategic?  It is easy to write an article saying, “Business leaders need to think and act more strategically.” It’s disingenuous to do so without providing proven tools to help balance managing operational crises during the effort to plan the long-term environment, including getting a richer understanding of their enterprise context. I am hoping to find out what current research and EA experts have found regarding this issue.