Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
by Chris Forde, GM APAC and VP Enterprise Architecture, The Open Group Since moving to China in March 2010 I have consistently heard a similar set of statements and questions, something like this…. “EA? That’s fine for Europe and America, … Continue reading →
Flexibility and agility are terms used almost interchangeably these days as attributes of IT architectures designed to cope with rapidly changing business requirements. Did you ever wonder if they are actually the same? Don’t you have the feeling that these terms remain abstract and without a concrete link to the design of an IT architecture? … Continue reading →
The Internet gives businesses access to ever-larger markets, but it also brings more competition. To prosper, they must deliver outstanding products and services. Often, this means processing the ever-greater, and increasingly complex, data that the Internet makes available. The question they now face is, how to do this without spending all their time and effort on information technology. … Continue reading →
I’m often struck by the common vision driving many members in the audience – a vision of building cohesion in a business, achieving the right balance between competing forces and bringing the business strategy and operations into harmony. However, as with many ambitious visions, the challenge in this case is immense. … Continue reading →
The big bang that started The Open Group Conference in Newport Beach was, appropriately, a presentation related to astronomy. Chris Gerty gave a keynote on Big Data at NASA, where he is Deputy Program Manager of the Open Innovation Program. And that exploration – as is often the case with successful space missions – left us wondering what lies beyond. … Continue reading →
The Open Group, a vendor- and technology-neutral consortium, which is represented locally by Real IRM, has approved the Exploration and Mining Business Reference Model (EM Model) as an Open Group Technical Standard. This is the first approved standard for the natural resources industry developed by the Exploration, Mining, Metals and Minerals (EMMM™) Forum, a Forum of The Open Group. … Continue reading →
OMI is a highly portable, easy to implement, high performance CIM/WS-Management Object Manager in OMI, designed specifically to implement the DMTF standards. OMI is written to be easy to implement in Linux and UNIX® systems. It will empower datacenter device vendors to compile and implement a standards-based management service into any device or platform in a clear and consistent way. The Open Group has made the source code for OMI available under an Apache 2 license. Continue reading →
I’m currently looking at international identity standards and thought that I might post some thoughts about them as I look at them. The first that I have looked at is ISO/IEC FDIS 24760-1:2011(E) “A framework for identity management – Part 1: Terminology and concepts”. This standard is supposed to define key terms for identity management […]
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 →
Van Haren Publishing recently published their 2012 – 2013 Global Standards and Publications book free online for all to use. I look at this book as a quick guide or a primer to the landscape of standards globally. The purpose…
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?
The discipline of Enterprise Architecture was developed in the 1980s with a strong focus on the information systems landscape of organizations. Since those days, the scope of the discipline has slowly widened to include more and more aspects of the enterprise as a whole. Architects, especially at the strategic level, attempt to answer the question “How should we organize ourselves in order to be successful?” Continue reading →