Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
We are told over and over that it is time for digitalisation of all areas of business, ideally also of all the private areas. Often this is sold in just having only benefits. We already know that for privacy reasons in the private area it may not be the best idea, however in business we … Continue reading Why digitalisation fails! →
We often talk about strategy but, how do we know if strategy does what it should?
Strategy is taken, usually, as both what we are aiming for and how are we getting there.
What we are aiming for, i.e. the goals have to be assessed first fo…
Organizations that predate the digital economy need to architect themselves to flourish in it. According to the The MIT Center for Information Systems Research (MIT CISR), they (more…)
The post Business Architecture is Critical for Organizati…
Enterprise Architecture is a young, immature discipline that produces models to guide the development of an enterprise. It is generally recognised to date back to the late 1980s or early 1990s and the work of Zachman, Spewak and others though it really took-off in the late 1990s and early years of the 21st Century. But methodological disciplines do not emerge complete […]
If we look at current IT-trends it is easy to say everybody has heard of Big Data. Although there are some known successes (for example US retailer Target which through its extensive data could predict pregnancy faster than the involved person) many compiling companies spend millions (or even billions) of dollars hoarding big data, without properly using it at all. According to Gartner, 85% of Fortune 500 organizations won’t be able to exploit their big data usefully in 2015. Now the key to using data at all, is knowing that you don’t necessarily need all data. As long as you know which data can be useful to your company – and maybe even more important – WHERE it is useful within your company, you don’t need to spend half of your budget on stacking information.
For those of us that have been practicing SOA for over a decade, it’s surprising that there’s so much interest in microservices. In fairness microservices don’t look like the vendor play that was early SOA in the early noughties. But experienced SOA pr…
For those of us that have been practicing SOA for over a decade, it’s surprising that there’s so much interest in microservices. In fairness microservices don’t look like the vendor play that was early SOA in the early noughties. But experienced SOA pr…
When I think of diversity usually I think of HR and long awareness meetings and a realisation that a heterogenous environment helps everyone, however diversity goes beyond this. Now before I talk about the new hype that is built on diversity I want to focus a bit on the ever existing tension between diversity and … Continue reading The hype to end all hypes 🙂 →
A while back, I wrote in the blog post ArchiMate is overrated (and underrated) that using ArchiMate doesn’t really have that much added value for communicating simple, high-level views to stakeholders (users, management), but its structure does bring advantages that enables us to … Continue reading →
This article by Selvyn Wright provides a good explanation about the use of Building Blocks in EA: http://www.irmuk.co.uk/articles/Selvyn_Wright_%20Building_Blocks.pdf?
After 30 years of talking about this, I am still shocked at the predominant misconception that the Rows of Zachman Framework define “level of detail,” or “waterfall,” or “decomposition.” This is just not true. The Rows of the Zachman Framework define TRANSFORMATION, NOT decomposition. Level of detail is defined in the HEIGHT of each cell (or Row), NOT the height of the Framework itself. While I originally I called the Rows “Perspectives,” the underlying theory that defines the Rows is the philosophical concept of Reification.
One day in Houston, I was doing a seminar for some folks and was describing the Perspectives that constitute the second dimension (the Rows) of classification depicted by my Framework and some guy in the back of the room said, “Ohhh! That’s reification!” I said, “Re-if-a-what???” I never heard the word before. I said, “spell it for me” “R-e-i-f-i-c-a-t-i-o-n.”
It turns out that “reification” is a word that comes out of Philosophy. The etymology of the word is from the Latin, where “RE” means “thing” so “RE – IFICATION” would mean “Thing-ifcation,” making a thing, an instantiation, out of an idea that you can think about such that the thing (instantiation) bears a resemblance with the idea that you start with. Plato and Aristotle and apparently some assemblage of early Philosophers knew that an idea that you can think about is one thing but the instantiation of that idea is a totally different thing… and if you want the instantiation to bear any resemblance with the idea, the idea has to go through a well-known set of transformations.
Reification (Rows of the Zachman Framework):
If the idea goes through this set of transformations, the Instantiation will bear resemblance with the idea. Reification is likely the more fundamental definition of the Rows of the Framework since it has been employed by humanity for several thousands of years. However, there is a strong correlation between Reification and the Perspectives as I identified them from the older disciplines of Architecture and Construction and Engineering and Manufacturing. This should not come as a great shock… there is a natural classification structure, it is manifest consistently in any application or discipline.
Mike Rosen has written an interesting article about complexity and EA. He says: “There are many different reasons that organizations do architecture, but if we distil them all down to the essentials, architecture is fundamentally about managing complexity and change through structure…. change is just one part of the complexity that we have to manage…