EA Voices – Page 687 – Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom

A Comparison of the Top Four Enterprise-Architecture Methodologies

March 23, 2013March 23, 2013 by Amitabh Apte

I recently came across a very good article with above title written by Roger Sessions on the Microsoft Network. It is
one of the few articles which is backed up by good amount of industry research,
rich usage of references and very precise analysis of Enterprise Architecture
literature.

In this article Roger compares following four leading
Enterprise Architecture Frameworks;

The Zachman Framework for Enterprise
Architecture
The Open Group Architecture Framework
Federal Enterprise Architecture
Gartner Enterprise Architecture Framework

He does so within the context of a fictional company that is facing
some very nonfictional operations problems. These problems include:

IT
systems that have become unmanageably complex and increasingly costly to
maintain.
IT
systems that are hindering the organization’s ability to respond to
current, and future, market conditions in a timely and cost-effective
manner.
Mission-critical
information that is consistently out-of-date and/or just plain wrong.
A
culture of distrust between the business and technology sides of the
organization.

Roger concludes that, “these methodologies are quite different
from each other, both in goals and in approach. This is good news and bad. It
is bad news, in that it increases the difficulty for many organizations in
choosing one single enterprise-architectural methodology. How do you choose
between methodologies that have so little in common? Choosing between Zachman
and TOGAF, for example, is like choosing between spinach and hammers. But the
good news is that these methodologies can be seen as complementing each other.
For many organizations, the best choice is all of these methodologies, blended
together in a way that works well within that organization’s constraints.”

Though the whitepaper is probably
getting a bit dated (Mar 2007) especially given the new releases from TOGAF 9.1
and Zachman have advanced the EA field in leaps and bounds, it is nonetheless a
very good piece of academic comparison grounded in some real life business
situation.

I have personally done similar compare
and contrast analysis between various EA frameworks on this blog through posts
such as, EA
Frameworks in Complete Harmony, Zachman
Complexity and Change, EA
– Different Perspectives. These can be referenced as further reading on
this topic.

Implementing Organizational Structure and Focus

March 23, 2013 by Leo de Sousa

When I joined the IT Department at the American University of Sharjah as the Director, I was presented with an organizational structure challenge. I found out that I had 21 direct reports and that my department did not have a concept of operational management! I had just come from being the Manager, Business Application Services […]

The post Implementing Organizational Structure and Focus appeared first on Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education.

Business Architecture

March 23, 2013 by Adrian Campbell

Tom Graves recently participated in an Open Group TweetJam on Business Architecture. You can read about the results of this at http://weblog.tetradian.com/2013/03/20/opengroup-on-bizarch/ Unfortunately I didn’t hear about this in time to participate but I thought I’d record my own thoughts here. The questions were: How do you define Business Architecture? What is the role of the business architect? What real world business problems […]

The Interconnectedness Of All Things

March 22, 2013 by Stuart Boardman

This site nearly got called The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Enterprise. My admiration for Douglas Adams only seems to increase with the years. Now he’s provided me with inspiration for the second blog in a row.

From Business Design to Business Change (#1) – The Content Paradox

March 21, 2013 by BizzDesign Staff

Let us suppose you work in an organization that needs improvement or change. You are a member of staff whose task is to support this. Perhaps you are a business consultant, a process designer or an architect. Some strategic decisions have been made and you and your colleagues are contributing the best you can. Doing analyses, making designs, supporting members of business management. The last few years your staff team has invested and improved significantly on <a style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;” title=”Training enterprise architecture, training business process management” href=”http://www.bizzdesign.com/training/”>knowledge, methods</a> and <a style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;” title=”Professional software tools are crucial for effective and efficient design, analyse and improvement of organisations” href=”http://www.bizzdesign.com/tools/”>tooling</a>. You have already been working hard on a coherent set of models (architecture, process, business objects?) as a basis for designing the business solutions required. <div class=”captionImage left” style=”width: 246px;”><img class=”left” src=”http://www.bizzdesign.com/assets/BlogDocuments-2/Business-Design.png” alt=”Business Design” title=”A solid business design is the start of ” width=”246″ height=”205″/>Creating a design for your business</div>In some cases this is enough for successfully facilitating business change. Indeed getting a grip on change in today’s increasingly complex business reality requires professional methods, tools and knowledge. Obviously, a thought-through business solution is a fundament for many successful business improvements. In other cases solid business design work is just not enough. When you come to think of it: why do you still see so many business change projects fail? And why is your serious design function in practice not always taken so seriously? And why is there a number of your good staff colleagues who are not happy or even frustrated with the impact of their work? <div class=”captionImage left” style=”width: 210px;”><img class=”left” src=”http://www.bizzdesign.com/assets/BlogDocuments-2/Solid-business-design.gif.png” alt=”Solid Business Design” title=”Sometimes business design is not enough” width=”210″ height=”140″/>Getting grip on business change</div>If you recognize this and find the questions above relevant, please join me in this series of blogs. I have noticed it is often not a lack of analysis or design capabilities that stands in the way of success. I have also experienced that supporting a business manager is often about everything but the content of the business problem. It is about context, perspective, about how a solution is developed, soft skills, stakes, ownership etcetera. I personally like to call this phenomena the ‘content paradox’. It’s influence on bottom-line results can be huge – and that interest me. These ‘other’, sometimes less-tangible, but everyday aspects might also be of interest to you in becoming more effective. In this blog series I intend to share some of my thoughts and experiences on this. The word cloud below gives a sneak preview of the concepts I expect to touch upon.<div class=”captionImage left” style=”width: 600px;”><img class=”left” src=”http://www.bizzdesign.com/assets/BlogDocuments-2/_resampled/resizedimage600386-Blog-cloud-Alex-Hendriks-BiZZdesign2.png” alt=”Word cloud Alex Hendriks” title=”Alex Hendriks will write about these topics in following blogs” width=”600″ height=”386″/>Blog word cloud Alex Hendriks</div>So what is your personal top-3 of answers to my ‘why-questions’ above?Please share your ideas on this with me at <a title=”E-mail Alex” href=”mailto:a.hendriks@bizzdesign.com”>a.hendriks@bizzdesign.com</a>, or leave a comment. In my next post I will discuss an innovative technique for staff teams to take on their client’s perspective.

TOGAF Good or Bad? – Definitely Ugly!

September 2, 2015March 21, 2013 by Nigel Green

I’m struggling with the value of TOGAF on my current assignment.

Background:

· We have a need to develop architectural thinking up the ‘food-chain’ to the C-level to help inform business strategy.

· The IT Leadership want to focus on: agility & resilience (fast response and ability to thrive under constant change), security, value-for-money and continuously improving User Experience

· Unusually for a private company, we are not currently focused on competition (we are a monopoly) nor inefficiency (labour cost – we rarely ‘let people go’).

· We have established business-engaged governance mechanisms around Cyber Threat, however, there’s cultural resistance to Western-style Governance practices and methods in other areas.

· The IT department is mostly seen as a Cost Centre, although we are making some progress here.

· English is the second language for the vast majority of our employees.

· Experienced Enterprise Architects are rarer than hen’s teeth in Hong Kong.

· A few on my team have been trained and ‘Certified’ in TOGAF (mostly before I joined) but they have not actually practiced EA (for a wide variety of reasons) since attending the course.

Observations:

· TOGAF is hard to comprehend for those whose 1st language is English, so it’s an even greater challenge for my team.

· TOGAF just tries too hard and ends up failing on a few counts; it’s too comprehensive to be a usable framework and not specific enough to be a methodology. It’s almost a philosophy, but a very incomplete and, at times, dangerously misleading one. This is very hard for my team to make sense of and I find myself having very long conversations with them where we end up agreeing that we reduce or focus on one or two of the TOGAF concepts (usually around a deliverable).

· TOGAF doesn’t seem to help very much when it comes to the challenges we face around Consumer-led IT.

· TOGAF does encourage SOA, that would help our agility & resilience goal eventually, but we’re quite a way from developing a genuine component-based, shared-services architecture due to the business organisation, culture and funding mechanisms. And we can’t wait for those to change to be able meet our agility & resilience needs.

· It’s fair to say,TOGAF training does help introduce newbies to some important EA perspectives and does help with common terms and concepts, but it requires a lot of additional buddy-work with an experienced architect to become useful and, what’s worse, it conveys the wrong message; ‘Enterprise Architecture is complicated and requires a high intellectual capacity to understand’. The latter being the absolute opposite of what I need to convey across IT and the business; ‘Enterprise Architecture is about joining-the-dots and making things simpler to understand’.

I do continue to put my team through TOGAF Certification. Why? It’s the only credible option here getting newbies up-to-speed on the basics of EA/SA and it helps my staff build their CVs (which is important). I just wish there was a better option that was both less and more:

less -a lighter-weight Car-Maintenance manual (maybe like Kevin Smith’s PEAF)

and

more – on the basic mentality required of of an EA (e.g ability to abstract) and why all organizations take a different approach to architecture based on culture, maturity and business priorities.

I sometimes wonder if the authors of TOGAF are motivated to make it more understandable, or, as seems to be the case, keep it obscure and arcane. It certainly felt that way when I was exposed to IAF (Capgemini’s Framework) and its zealots for the first time.

An aside here: in a recent chat with the Chief Architect in a well-known travel company, I said I needed the 80 page version of TOGAF – he laughed and responded that he’d implemented an 8 page version! BTW: all his architects are native-English speakers hired in from abroad.