Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Transformation is the latest concept to capture the attention of business and IT executives alike. Driven by a combination of improving economics, changes in the competitive landscape, a flurry of mergers and acquisitions and more aggressive public policy objectives, most…
Enterprise strategies are established to assist in moving towards and achieving defined business visions. These strategies are dynamic and are expected to be refined, over time; changes being driven by market forces, business or technical innovation, new legislative requirements or … Continue reading →
I’m often confronted by solution architects, IT and technical architects who don’t understand what Enterprise Architecture is all about. They usually misinterpret enterprise architecture from their own perspective as some kind of system design of ‘enterprise’ scale IS/IT systems and become frustrated when they discover that it is really something else. It often turns out that […]
Enterprise Architecture is all about supporting strategic planning and business transformation activities, although many organisations seem to almost wilfully forget that this is one of the main purposes of Enterprise Architecture if not the most important one. A business strategy is a long-term plan of changes for the whole enterprise which will address things like offering new products an […]
Anchor models are context diagrams that capture the essence of the enterprise as a simple graphic. They should be equally meaningful to both business and IT personnel and should be so intuitive that they don’t require a multi-page text narrative…
I am currently involved with the EAST group (an outreach group of SCiO http://www.scio.org.uk/ ) which is looking at the overlap between Enterprise Architecture and System Thinking, and in particular the Viable System Model (VSM). The Viable System Model has been around for many years, coming out of Stafford Beer’s work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Stafford_Beer This diagram looks complex at […]
We are used to the idea of a Programme/Project Management Office (PMO) but often organisations fail to understand (or perhaps deliberately misunderstand) what the Enterprise Architecture function does. I propose that the Enterprise Architecture function is, in effect, an Office of the CEO, or an Office of the CEO and Strategic Change Management. The book […]
If you want to execute a business strategy then you’ll need an Enterprise Architecture function. Enterprise architecture (EA) is about change – strategic change in an enterprise. But not exogenous change – reactive change forced on the enterprise by outside exigencies – although that sort of change and those external forces may be taken into […]