Enterprise Architecture

Video Highlights of Day 2 at the Cannes Conference

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Video recap of Day 2 of The Open Group Conference in Cannes by Peter Haviland, E&Y. Continue reading →

Thank you Jeanne Ross

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Hooray hooray hooray! – the message is finally getting through! This from an interview with MIT-CISR‘s Jeanne Ross in the current (29 April 2012) online edition of CIO.com: Myth: CIOs should own enterprise architecture. Not so fast. CIOs often wind up accountable for the entire enterprise architecture, despite not typically having the authority or vantage point […]

There’s no short-cut to experience

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At least he was open about it, I guess. “Tell you what I’ll do”, he says to my colleague here in Guatemala, “I’ll find you a client, then I’ll sit in, learn everything you do, and then I’ll apply it in my own business. How does that sound to you?” Uh, no. Not a good […]

Is the EA the DJ?

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A lovely one-liner and follow-up from Kevin Smith (of PragmaticEA / PEAF fame), in a Skype conversation earlier today: Is the EA the DJ? He doesn’t tell people how to dance. He provides the music for them to dance to. He sets the mood. He sets the tempo. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq71rV2FXSI http://www.electronicarchitecture.co.uk Listen. Feel. Connect. Interact. Imagination. […]

Twin-Track Architecture

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#entarch This post follows discussions with Graham Berrisford of Avancier about the relationship between Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Solution Architecture (SA).

What seems to make sense is to describe EA/SA as a twin-track process (similar to th…

It’s not a cycle

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If it’s not a cycle, don’t call it a cycle. In the past few days I’ve had a fair bit of struggle to get clients to understand the difference between a linear-sequence with a beginning, a middle and an end, versus a true cycle where the end of one sequence links to or becomes the […]

Cannes Conference Day 2: Proactively Engaging in the Transformation Process Paramount for Enterprise Architects

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The Open Group Cannes Conference Day 2 recap, highlighting plenary sessions by Dr. Saeed Al Daheri, United Arab Emirates Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Peter Haviland, Mick Adams and Garth Emrich, Ernst & Young’s Advisory Services; and Judy Cerenzia,…

EA Heuristics #1: Looking for gaps? Push from top, guide from bottom.

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A police helicopter. Police helicopter helps police gets a big picture of the city, so that the police knows what to focus on. The police still need to rely on people on the ground for details. A situation similar to the heuristic described in this article.
photo credit: metropolitan police
(this article is part of the series “12 Heuristics for Enterprise Architecting“)

When looking for gaps in the current stage architecture, a useful approach is start by “pushing from the top”—start with the enterprise’s strategic objectives, then use the objectives’ linkages with other views to assess if there are any gaps, and then gradually move down through views level by level.

It is important to start the search for gaps from the top, as gaps more closely related to enterprises’ strategic objectives would be uncovered first. This approach decreases the likelihood of missing important gaps or being distracted by less important ones.

While pushing from the top, it is useful to “guide from bottom”—use anecdotal evidence to focus the search for gaps. During our EA exercise, we gathered a number of pain points through conversations with the organization’s employees and reviewing customer satisfaction survey results. However, when we did the analysis by “pushing from the top”, we were puzzled as we could not find those pain points. We analyzed the issue further, focusing on areas where the anecdotal pain points should have shown up, and finally realized that it was because there were missing metrics, and this discovery helped us uncover a second issue—the metrics were not granular enough.  If not for the knowledge of the pain points from “the bottom”, our “push from the top” analysis would have yielded nothing.

EA Heuristics #1: Looking for gaps? Push from top, guide from bottom.

by
A police helicopter. Police helicopter helps police gets a big picture of the city, so that the police knows what to focus on. The police still need to rely on people on the ground for details. A situation similar to the heuristic described in this article.
photo credit: metropolitan police
(this article is part of the series “12 Heuristics for Enterprise Architecting“)

When looking for gaps in the current stage architecture, a useful approach is start by “pushing from the top”—start with the enterprise’s strategic objectives, then use the objectives’ linkages with other views to assess if there are any gaps, and then gradually move down through views level by level.

It is important to start the search for gaps from the top, as gaps more closely related to enterprises’ strategic objectives would be uncovered first. This approach decreases the likelihood of missing important gaps or being distracted by less important ones.

While pushing from the top, it is useful to “guide from bottom”—use anecdotal evidence to focus the search for gaps. During our EA exercise, we gathered a number of pain points through conversations with the organization’s employees and reviewing customer satisfaction survey results. However, when we did the analysis by “pushing from the top”, we were puzzled as we could not find those pain points. We analyzed the issue further, focusing on areas where the anecdotal pain points should have shown up, and finally realized that it was because there were missing metrics, and this discovery helped us uncover a second issue—the metrics were not granular enough.  If not for the knowledge of the pain points from “the bottom”, our “push from the top” analysis would have yielded nothing.

12 Heuristics for Enterprise Architecting

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Photo of a compass. The heuristics that I present in this articles will be like a compass for my future enterprise architecture exercises, guiding me in what to focus on.
photo credits: i k o

Lessons learnt as I reflect on a recent four-month Enterprise Architecting (EA) exercise.   In the exercise, a 4-person team helped an organization map out where the organization was at, where it wanted to be and how it could get there.

Each lesson is captured as a heuristic, a rule of thumb that I want to remember so that I can use it to guide me for future projects.  They are not truths, and will get refined with more experience and insight.  I definitely hope to hear your experiences that relate to these heuristics, regardless of whether they support or invalidate a heuristic.

What made this EA exercise interesting is that, though it is not my first EA exercise, it is the first one I took a lead role in.  Also, this exercise made use of a methodology new to me, from MIT course “Enterprise Architecting” taught by Professor Deborah Nightingale and Dr. Donna Rhodes. In addition, ideas from the book “Enterprise Architecture as Strategy” also crept into the EA exercise, as I was concurrently attending a class by the book’s co-author Dr. Jeanne Ross.