Marcelo Andrade Clara

IT executive with over 35 years of experience, with strong and consistent work in the Brazilian financial sector. Throughout his career, he created the Clara/EA framework — a practical model for integrating business architecture and technology architecture in high-complexity environments.

The path that gave rise to the framework was forged through decades of executive practice in high-complexity environments, drawing on established methods of organizational management. Clara/EA is the result of this combination of structured theory and executive practice — developed not as an academic exercise, but as a response to real problems of managing, transforming, and sustaining complex systems.

He works today as a mentor, advisor, and board member in initiatives of enterprise architecture, digital transformation, and technology governance. The Clara/EA framework and the EA/CMDB tool are the most recent expressions of this work.

How the method matured

How Clara/EA came to be

The Clara/EA platform was not born from academic exercise. It emerged from sustained immersion in large, complex projects in which, across every engagement, the same difficulty kept reappearing: the absence of a shared view of what the strategy is, what the business architecture is, what the technology supporting them is, the challenges of each, and the strategic roadmap that ties it all together. Clara/EA is the structured answer to that problem.

1992 · Premise

First exposure to structured methods of organizational management, introduced by Rui Simon. The central intuition is born: operational problems have structural roots. The premise that would underpin the entire framework is seeded.

1995–2012 · Discipline

Nearly two decades in strategic planning, budgeting and technology governance in a high-complexity banking environment. The founding premise becomes operational discipline.

2010s–2020s · Synthesis

Leadership of large-scale, complex projects — mergers, portfolio modernization, channel expansion, platform integration, mounting regulatory demands. The recurring difficulty of aligning strategy, business architecture, technology and roadmap surfaces as the central problem to solve, not as noise. The 13 layers, their hierarchies and interdependencies begin to crystallize as the operational answer.

2025 · Tooling

Conception and development of EA/CMDB — a graph repository that materializes the Clara/EA model. The framework moves out of slides and gains an operational, navigable, auditable platform.

2026 · Systematization

Publication of the Clara/EA book. Work as mentor, advisor and board member — now applying the method as an instrument of corporate transformation rather than as a discovery in progress.

Book · in progress

Clara/EA

Enterprise Architecture Framework

Systematization of the framework in book form — a synthesis of the decades of practice that gave rise to the method and to EA/CMDB.

Expected publication · 2026

Influences

People and ideas that shaped the method

Grande parte do que hoje compõe o Clara/EA tem origem em mentores e líderes encontrados ao longo da carreira. Cada um deixou marcas específicas no framework — em métodos de planejamento, em modos de pensar a estrutura organizacional, em exemplos de liderança técnica.

Among these influences, methods of management through stages of organizational maturity and through balance of managerial roles provided important lenses to sustain healthy growth — a premise that runs through every layer of Clara/EA.

"Structure shapes behavior."

The phrase that opens the book and synthesizes the central thesis of the framework: the way an organization is structured defines the results it achieves — it does not merely reflect strategic choices, it actively conditions them.

How Clara/EA came to be

People and ideas that shaped the method

For strategic conversations