Kai Schlüter

Thanks to a great post from Ivo Velitchkov which unplugged some thinking of mine I was able to put some words around a couple of ideas and approaches I use. One post about Communication rather than creating an aligned (meaningless) language and a second post about truly Bridging the Silos instead of creating a new Enterprise Architecture silo. 

So here another quote from Ivo:

EA is often in the position to attract some serious budgets for reasons we’ll see in another dream, and this way the new island becomes a safe territory for people that have either failed or lost interest in the pure IT. This as a result further decreases the credibility of EA which slowly, in some organisations, gets the image of a place for people that are not good enough for IT and prefer to hide under EA labels where things are vague enough and much more difficult to measure. The lost credibility either undermines the work of the really good EA practitioners or pushes them out of the organisation or both.

 This immediately reminded me of an Enterprise Modelling Anti Pattern from Scott Ambler the so called Enterprise Parking Lot. Here a quote from Scott:

Your enterprise modelling group is composed of a lot of very smart people who don’t fit in well anywhere else within IT but you don’t want to lose their knowledge.

I personally have often observed a combination of both and therefore I phrase it the Capability Cemetery. So how to fix or handle this? First of all I am typically looking at each individuals capability. It is fairly seldom the case that there is people who try to avoid working under all circumstances, even thought that happens now and then. In most cases there is a deficit or GLUE Disease somewhere, a conflict between the organization setup (be it structural, process, project or any other organization) and the way the individual person is willing to operate. Typically, via investing in the interesting to reveal the relevant, it is possible to dig out the real root cause of the problem. Knowing the root cause then allows to optimize the information flow through the circulatory GLUE Cube.

As I have written in my last post “drEAmtime – Communication” a a great post from Ivo Velitchkov caught my attention and triggered me to think which is now resulting in the second post of a series of yet unknown length.To quote Ivo:The EA people i…

I read a great post from Ivo Velitchkov about drEAmtime which i recommend to read. I will try to pickup Ivos observations and explore how I handle the things he mentioned. He put in a great way what I am also observing and where I therefore use a different approach, even though I am in the end just another Enterprise Architect.

To quote Ivo:

The strong IT smell of the EA language decreases the chance of the Business to believe that they would benefit from learning it and that explains the low motivation and buy-in. Even though the cognitive load for IT is much lower, seeing the willingness of the Business to ‘improve’ its literacy, IT people find better things to be busy with. And another funny point. When there is some buy-in by the Business, EA is put under IT, not between business and IT. Then EA people complain they can’t do much from there. But may be they are put there just because they can’t do much.

Well observed if you ask me. So what am I doing to handle this? First of all I focus on people:

That is easy to say and write, but what does it actually mean? Well, I invest in the interesting to reveal the relevant. And I do that by using the “normal” language, so no special words, no special approach and for sure nothing based on any given EA framework. Just nothing, plain talking in a well proven language. (This does of course work only if it is one of the two languages I mastered good enough so far. I am trying hard to add a third one, but it seems to be a long and difficult journey to success).

From an communication point of view I indeed believe that I should operate between IT and Business, but this is not based on having the title Enterprise Architect, but based on my interest in operating in two domains at the same moment in time. That allows me actually to love to talk IT talk and business talk. I have literally no demand to force IT and business into speaking the same language or force them through a very rigid process, because I stopped thinking to be an Enterprise Architect and started to know that I am. Therefore I operate between business and IT, even though from an organizational point of view I am at the moment located in IT.

So I just focus on repairing the information flow, which then allows to find better solutions, some of them supported by IT solutions, some of them not supported. Reality is though that most EA approaches (frameworks as much as people owning the title Enterprise Architect) I have seen so far are indeed not aiding and simplifying the communication but do add an enormous amount of cognitive load, which is literally impossible to understand for anyone not fully familiar with the various methods. I might find the time to explore the benefit of acting like that later, but for the moment the key message is: optimize the information flow by utilizing communication.

Today I was triggered by some posts where there was some opinions on where the line between Architecture and Design is.

One discussion was around an interesting blog post from Mark Wilson: “Where’s the line between [IT] Architecture and Design“. From my point of view Chris Potts answered it in a great way:

No line. An architect designs. | RT @martinhowitt: The line between architecture & design? By @markwilsonit markwilson.co.uk/blog/2013/01/w… #entarch
— Chris Potts (@chrisdpotts) Januar 23, 2013

There was a second Twitter post which caught my attention:

Architecture stops when detailed design begins. #TOGAF #EntArch
— Glen McCallum (@mccallumg) Januar 23, 2013

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