Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
This is in response to the recent article of Richard Veryard “Arguing with Mendeleev”. There he comments on Zachman’s comparison of his framework with the periodic table of Mendeleev. And indeed there are cells in both tables with labelled columns (called “groups” in Mendeleev’s) and rows (“periods” respectively). Another similarity is that both deal with […]
As a lot, Enterprise Architects are not terribly humble people. We name frameworks after ourselves, and sometimes go to great lengths to correct the “misinterpretations” of others who describe our work in a way that we don’t agree with.
Yet, recognizing that the field is young requires that we should be willing to change as the field of EA changes; that we should be willing to look back on our models, developed in the past, and admit that we missed a few steps that we wouldn’t miss today.
I recently had the opportunity to discuss, on LinkedIn, a blog post that I made five years ago. I look back on that blog post and must admit that my opinions are a bit different now than they were five years ago. I still agree with my post, but I would certainly use different words today than I used in the past. I am more than willing to admit it.
I also look at the efforts of Alexander Osterwalder whose Business Model Canvas has proved both practical and flawed. He missed the fact that he needed to create a differentiation between the customer’s needs and the value proposition of the business offering to fill some of those needs. Did he go back and create an updated canvas? Nope. He created a new canvas to describe demand as though it fits with his older one (hint: it’s a mess).
The venerable John Zachman, probably one of the most humble men I’ve met, also made this same mistake. While his original model was only a couple of columns, and was updated only a few years later into the table we see today, the field of EA has changed. The table is no longer representative of companies with multiple business models (most of them) and the lack of a “customer” row simply relegates his “ontological table” to the dust bin.
Neither man will change. They have “legacy” models, with their names attached. To paraphrase Forrest Gump, humble is as humble does.
I would like to think that my willingness to upend my EBMM and replace it periodically with new versions shows my willingness to admit that (a) I’m often wrong, and (b) I’d rather learn than become stale. That said, I’m no paradigm of humility, myself.
After all, a truly humble EA would not have written this blog post.
(As my teenage daughter would say: Oh snap, you pwned yourself!)
How should we organize ourselves in order to be successful? An architecture framework is a foundational structure for developing a broad range of architectures and consists of a process and a modeling component. The TOGAF® framework and the ArchiMate® modeling language are two leading and widely adopted standards in this field. Continue reading →
I heard some very interesting talks today from Len Fehskens and Jeff Scott at the Open Group conference. One thing that I picked up in a meeting yesterday was the notion that TOGAF 9.1 is built on “best practices.” Today, as Jeff spoke about the transformation of a technical architect into a business architect, and as Len spoke about the challenges of communicating complex ideas, the notion of a “best practice” kept bothering me, and I cross-pollinated my concerns with the concepts that they were sharing.
I agree that the intent of the people who shared their practices with the Open Group was to provide practices that can be taught and followed. I even agree that the people on the TOGAF committees that accepted the content felt that the practices represented the best that the industry had to offer at the time. But I wonder if any of the work done in framework committees of any stripe (not to pick on the Open Group) can be held to the standard of being a “best practice.”
Are the practices in the TOGAF framework truly “best��� practices? Are these practices the best ones that the EA field has to offer?
I guess I would have to follow the EA rabbit hole and ask “what criteria do we use to judge if a practice is the best one?”
After all, when Jeff Scott talks about business architecture using capability modeling, he believes that the practice of capability modeling is the best one to use for the results he is trying to achieve. (I nearly always agree with Jeff, BTW. We sometimes differ in language, but nearly never in approach). That said, as much as Jeff and I agree, our agreement does not mean that the practice should be considered a “best” practice. Who are we to say? We are practitioners. While that is good, it is not enough in my mind to qualify the practice as “best.”
To be a best practice, in my opinion, a method or approach has to meet a higher bar. There has to be evidence that it is, in fact, better than just a “good practice.”
I think a best practice should have:
I wonder if we went through most of our frameworks and highlighted the text that is able to meet a higher bar, like the one I describe, how much of the text would we cover? 2%? 10%?
Is 10% coverage enough to say that a framework is based on best practices?
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