Enterprise Architecture

Setting up for ebooks on EA blogs

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I’m currently sifting through my past blog-posts of the past five years or so, with a view to republishing some of them in ebook-format, to make them more accessible in a more convenient and more portable form. So far there are well over 400 blog-posts here on enterprise-architecture and related themes, plus a few more […]

Real-time sensemaking with SCAN

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What do we do when we don’t know what to do? – and how do we ensure that whatever we do is the right thing to do? How do we make sense fast, at business-speed? I’ve been tussling with this one for quite a while, most recently culminating with a simple sensemaking framework called SCAN: The horizontal green-line […]

Marketing and the service-oriented enterprise

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As the economy shifts ever onward from manufacturing toward services, how do marketing and market-relationships need to change with this shift? And what enterprise-architectures do we need to support this? [In part this is a follow-on from Dave Gray’s excellent Dachis Group article ‘Everything is a service’: I strongly recommend to read that post first […]

Five EA app ideas – anyone interested?

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This is another follow-on to the earlier post ‘Helping others make sense of my work’ – this time about how to bring all of this to a wider audience and market, and help bring ‘whole-enterprise architecture’ ideas into more general use. If you’ve been around this weblog for a while, you’ve probably noticed I tend […]

On sensemaking in enterprise-architecture [4]

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How do we make sense of uniqueness in enterprise-architecture? How do we support decisions at ‘business-speed’ – especially when the context is in part unique? And what architectural support do we need to provide for sensemaking and decision-making at business-speed? In the first part of this series we looked briefly at uniqueness, and why it’s […]

When identical is not the same as equal

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Is ‘identical’ always the same as ‘equal’? Not in service-design – and one of the issues we need to watch for is to ensure that identical service-provision does not lead to far-from-equal service-outcomes. If ever you want an all-too-real example of this problem in practice, go to almost any public event, and note the huge queues […]

Changing the Congressional Budget Office to the Congressional Enterprise Architecture Office

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The Current Mission of the CBO
Currently, the mission of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO):

“is to provide Congress with objective, timely, nonpartisan analyses needed for economic and budget decisions and the information and estimates required for the Congressional budget process” [from CBO TESTIMONY Statement of Robert D. Reischauer Director Congressional Budget Office before the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress,[the] Congress of the United States]
The director broke that into three operating strategies:
1. Helping the Congress formulate a budget plan;
2. Helping the Congress stay within that plan; and,
3. Helping the Congress consider policy issues related to the budget and the economy.
The Problem with the Current Mission
This Mission and Strategies is part of the economic, political, and social problems currently facing the United States, and, potentially, a source for the solution of those problems. The reason that the CBO is part of the problem is that finance engineering has influenced Congress to emphasize the “financial” part of an overall Enterprise Architecture. That is, Congress proposes functional and component changes to the US Federal Government and the CBO responds with an analysis, which Congress can choose to spin-doctor to its political purposes. Consequently, Congress can choose to support any industry; examples include agriculture (subsidies) and housing (mortgage deductions, etc.), gambling (gambling deductions), and so on.
A Solution the Congressional Enterprise Architecture Office
As I demonstrate in my book, Organizational Economics: The Formation of Wealth, the body performing the controlling (see IDEF0 post) and governing functions of any organization has three Missions, Security, Standards, and Infrastructure.  This is particularly true of any organization that has a spatial domain.  These missions appear in the Preamble of the US Constitution and throughout that document.
Given these three high-level missions, and my discussion of the role and responsibilities of the Enterprise Architect (as a sub-discipline of Systems Engineering), what the US Federal Government needs is a real implementation of the FEA Framework and a formal Enterprise Architecture process.  This process aligns the departments’, agencies’, and other organizations’ of the Federal Government with the three high-level missions of government. 

Additionally, Enterprise Architecture proposes where develop, transform, reform, end or otherwise change the organizations’ missions, strategies, processes, and tooling.  For the US Federal Government, (or any other organization of this scope and size), the EA process must be recursive, but traceable and integratable.  The CBO is in the position with some of the responsibilities for doing this. 

Why not have Congress empower them as the Congressional Enterprise Architecture Offiice?

Changing the Congressional Budget Office to the Congressional Enterprise Architecture Office

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The Current Mission of the CBOCurrently, the mission of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO):”is to provide Congress with objective, timely, nonpartisan analyses needed for economic and budget decisions and the information and estimates required for t…

Domains and dimensions in SCAN

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What are the sensemaking-domains in SCAN? What are the boundaries between those domains? A great challenge in an earlier comment from Roger Sessions, where he asked me for the mathematical basis for those domains and boundaries. I think he was a bit shocked when I said there wasn’t one – but in fact there is […]