Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Often, when working with customers on various Enterprise Architecture projects, it is important to differentiate the various levels of architecture so everyone is on the same page about what we are working on. This also gets at the heart of some …
Sometimes, I have a hard time being upbeat about the emergence of EA as a profession. This felling is especially acute when I come across a slick, well-prepared guide to Enterprise Architecture, written by an IT Architect, that is incomplete, ina…
As I’ve noted in prior posts, many hard working business process management professionals find the concept of “Business Capabilities” to be confusing at best, and counterproductive at worst. In a recent article in BPTrends, Paul Harmon made…
An architecture that is merely a PDF with a couple of generic line-box-arrow diagrams coupled with a few colorful “pancake” pictures isn’t really an architecture. It’s a marketing glossy. A white paper is too generic to be passed off as a real solution…
There is much to recommend about changing how we create, deploy and offer our services and products to customers. Yet there is an entire consulting industry built around avoiding the pitfalls of cloud.
Was showing a colleague one of my favourite small books yesterday: Matthew Frederick’s 101 Things I Learned In Architecture School. Briefly flicking through the two-page spreads, one caught my eye. Seems so apposite to enterprise-architecture and the like that it’s worth reproducing here in its entirety:
Two points of view on architecture
ARCHITECTURE IS AN EXERCISE IN […]
For those of you who have been waiting for me to announce the release of the newest version of the Enterprise Business Motivation Model, I’m happy to announce that version 3.5 is available now. To visit a Wordpress site set up to explain the …
Recently, Paul Harmon published an article in BPTrends that discusses his views on the notion of Business Capability, and whether it is a useful concept. He was not particularly kind to the field of Business Architecture in his article. Whi…
There is a clear distinction between Enterprise Architecture, as described by the architect, and Enterprise Architecture as implemented by the enterprise. I would like to posit the following as a fundamental principle that describes the differenc…
I ran across a document from the Dept. of Commerce that describes Enterprise Architecture as follows: “An Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a blueprint that explains how the results of Strategic Planning, Performance Planning, Budgeting, Capital Pl…
Microsoft IT made a bet, a couple of years ago, on using capability modeling in our own internal Business Architecture program. That required us to have a shared and consistent hierarchy of business capabilities that we would use across all lines…
Back when my kids were small, they all played soccer on local youth teams. It is interesting to watch very young kids play soccer, because the instructions are so simple: kick the ball into the goal. With instructions like that, what do y…