Business Architecture Anti-Pattern: The Nature of the Inventory Viewpoint

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The Portfolio Viewpoint is a collection of well-defined capabilities and their relationships across a set of domains. The Portfolio Viewpoint supports executive level discussions and business strategy because it traces stakeholder (CEO, CIO, COO, CISO) vision to decision grade information for IT investment.

But the Portfolio View usually doesn’t start out that way.

It frequently begins life as an Inventory Viewpoint that has little value outside of Enterprise Architecture or Business Architecture teams. Some attributes of the Inventory Viewpoint are as follows:

As you can see the level of order is much higher and therefore of greater value in the Portfolio Viewpoint and while there are probably other attributes one can add to the mix the table above identifies some important ones.

The danger with the Inventory Viewpoint is that if it is maintained in the same condition long term then it becomes an anti-pattern. Collecting capabilities without understanding the depth of their connections and the wealth of their meaning will end up as shelf-ware in a repository, however sophisticated that repository may feel.

So resist the temptation to hoard capabilities. Don’t be afraid to talk to the business. And, above all, pay attention to what your stakeholders and their deputies tell you, particularly the office of the CEO, CIO, COO, and CISO.

IT Wastelands :: How many icebergs have you melted?

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High performance servers, cheap network storage, faster network connections, and improved peripheral performance have become subtle contributors for a culture of IT waste. System designers are increasingly relieved of the burden of designing efficient systems that utilize resources conservatively, and can easily fall back on platitudes like “just add more hardware”. A system designer may […]

Making Strategy Work with Enterprise Architecture

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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 […]

IT: The professionals

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Business decision makers aren’t interested in the details, but they want to know important IT decisions being made in their business are in the hands of true professionals. Certification verifies the qualities and skills IT executives have with regards to the effective deployment, implementation and operation of IT solutions. Continue reading →

A week in Tweets: 12-18 December 2010

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Finally catching up, though my cold is still such that I’m at risk of dripping into the keyboard – oh joys… Still, I do promise to return to other (more useful?) posts shortly – there’s quite a backlog built up whilst I’ve been sort-of out of action. In the meantime, yes, another week’s-worth […]

A week in Tweets: 05-11 December 2010

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Slipping back a bit – combination of travel, bad jetlag and an even worse cold… Oh well. Anyway, another week’s-worth of Tweets and links, as usual, for whoever might find them useful.

Enterprise-architecture, business-architecture, business-strategy, business-models and suchlike businessy matters:

SAlhir: White Space, Dark Matter, and Enterprise Architecture http://bit.ly/i4LBIn <strong recommend #entarch #itarch
business_design: revised my […]

European Interoperability Framework 2.0

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This week, the European Commission announced an updated interoperability policy in the EU. The Commission has committed itself to adopt a Communication that introduces the European Interoperability Strategy (EIS) and an update to the European Interoperability Framework (EIF), “two key documents […]

The Trusted Technology Forum: Best practices for securing the global technology supply chain

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Supply chain risk needs focus to be able to address the concern. If everything is “a supply chain risk,” then we can’t focus our efforts and hone in on a reasonable, achievable, practical and implementable set of practices that can lead to better supply chain practices for all, and a higher degree of confidence among purchasers. Continue reading →