Link: http://weblog.tetradian.com/2012/10/12/definition-as-ea-antipattern/
If you’re an enterprise-architect and you haven’t yet come across Ric Phillips‘ wonderful EA Patterns blog, go over there right now: you’re in for a treat! To mix metaphors somewhat, I’d have to say it’s a national-treasure for the trade. 
Yet there’s a definite challenge for me there, too, because as Ric says:
My goal is to share good ideas about enterprise architecture without using a lot of words.
Uh… oops… sorry… 
Yeah, my output does use “a lot of words”, I’ll have to admit that…
But there’s an even worse challenge for me in his most recent post:
Architecture-by-definition is an anti-pattern.
The goal of a definition is to remove noise.
You add another layer of noise when your definitions are model-specific sub-definitions for commonly understood terms. For example: service, product, capability, or system.
Special definitions introduce an additional cognitive load that easily outweighs the benefits of a more sophisticated model.
Ouch indeed – because I’ve put a lot of effort into precision on definitions on terms such as service versus product, or service versus function versus capability, or the distinctions between ‘organisation’ and ‘enterprise’. (Use the search-box on this page – to the right of or below this post – to do a web-search here for those terms: you’ll soon find some of the relevant posts. A fair few slidedecks, too. A heck of a lot, overall. Oh well.)
To be slightly more fair to myself here, most of it has been about precision of terminology for use within EA itself – not necessarily for use outside of our own discipline. Much like building-architects, we need precision of terms in some places, where others might get away with much looser terminology. (Though that loose usage is itself often highly problematic: witness the chaos caused by the near-random meanings assigned to ‘business-process’ versus ‘business-service’ versus ‘business-function’ versus ‘business-capability’ verus ‘business-unit’ and so on and so on. Sigh…)
But if Ric is right, then it’s possible – probable? – that all I’ve done is added to the confusion and ‘noise’. Has it all just been a waste of everyone’s time? Yikes… 
Your opinions and comments, perhaps?
