No matter the pressure to improve enterprise efficiency and agility—Today! If not sooner!—companies, unlike the X-Men, cannot leap over stages in their evolution, says CISR’s Ross. Each stage lays the technological, procedural, cultural and behavioral foundation for the next. The impossibility of skipping stages holds true even in companies where one entity is ahead of the others. For example, in 2002 McGrane considered Mead to be at Stage 3, but then the company merged with Westvaco, which was at Stage 1. As CIO of the new MeadWestvaco, McGrane had to bring the newly acquired parts of the company through Stage 2 before moving them to Stage 3. Now, the unified organization is moving closer to the same maturity level.

Enterprises should also understand that architecture is never done, says ZapThink analyst Schmelzer. "The idea is to continuously adjust the service—not necessarily the implementation—such as composing two finer-grained services into a more composite one or vice versa," he says. Typically, CIOs don’t have those skills, so they should have a chief architect or architecture team reporting to them, Schmelzer advises.

However an enterprise manages its architectural evolution, it must remember that the journey is the reward. Says CISR’s Ross, "The end point is much less important than the continuous improvement you gain. You need to get a little better every day. It’s not about how to get to Stage 4."

Galen Gruman is a frequent contributor to CIO.