Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Previously, we talked about the ways to achieve a balance between value and risk in order to get the most out of your cloud investments. In that post I identified the methods and tools used to identify value and minimize…
This post will provide a little more exposition and insight into one method I have found useful in practice for quickly defining current state. Done well, it can provide an honest and objective look in the mirror to successfully understand where we truly are as an organization and face the uncomfortable truth in some cases where we need to improve. 
Definitions are attention-seekers. And good ones. They get much more attention than they deserve. I’ve just read a post by Nick Malik called Many (flawed) Definitions of Business Architecture. There he does a very good job of analysing the existing definitions of Business Architecture. He comes to the conclusion that all of them need to […]
As I have written in my last post I believe that Enterprise Architecture is inevitable happening, no matter if it is done the one way or the other. I personally sense a lot of tribal thinking in the Enterprise Architecture community where in the heat of the discussion I sometimes wonder why there is so much talk about two sides (e.g. EITA vs EA) or even three (three schools of EA) or towards others (IT vs Business). I personally believe that the whole is a circulatory system which is always happening:
So I believe the right discussion should be along the line: how do we make the flow through the circulatory system (GLUE is just a model to reflect that) optimal instead of focusing on setting up boundaries and controls to ensure that a specific role works in a specific box. So overlaps, as described in an earlier post, is not bad if you ask me, but in fact very healthy, because to succeed not one person can decide on his own limited knowledge, but it forces people into working together, ideally collaborating or at least cooperating.
Non cooperation is a quite common pattern here though, and that is exactly what I sense in the Enterprise Architecture Community way more often than I personally understand, because it leads to nowhere. This is a discussion no one can win, because both argumentation chains (or the three of them) are valid and will be valid forever. The reason is fairly simple: By choosing a leading approach to Enterprise Architecture (be it a framework or a person) which we then follow, we focus on the difference, the unified selling proposition of that specific framework or leader. That ultimately leads to a scattered approach to Enterprise Architecture, which is a joke by itself, given the fact that most Enterprise Architects preach for standardisation across all functions.
My almost 4 year old son was a source of inspiration (once again, as well as his siblings) for me, by making a great quote:
So what is my answer: I focus on the similarities, the common pattern. The things which unite Enterprise Architecture and are indeed the same. I think there is way more in common between the different approaches (and that includes Business Architecture, Project Management, Strategy, Innovation Management and many other things) than we allow ourself to accept and see. We kind of play the game of the three apes, and I wonder why.
Due to that I will focus in my future posts on something different than core Enterprise Architecture: What to learn from others is my leading theme for the next posts. Of course, as always, comments are welcome. So if you want me to look into something else which I only scratched so far then please let me know. Input from the community helps me to get my thinking straigthened.
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There is a curious ambiguity about the word “iteration”. Sometimes it means doing exactly the same thing, over and over again; sometimes it means doing something slightly different each time.
When a process is drawn as a loop, we need to understand wh…
Anyone who’s involved in enterprise-architecture will know there’s a huge ongoing clash-of-the-mindsets between those who think it’s all about IT and that EA should belong as part of the IT-department, versus those who think it’s about a much larger picture…
I recently saw a Forrester blog entry from George Colony at: http://blogs.forrester.com/george_colony/12-08-27-enterprise_architects_for_dummies_ceos And recently I’ve been reading an interesting book called Good to Great by James Collins. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_to_Great The Forrester blog talks about succeeding with realizing the business strategy by involving enterprise architects, whereas the Good to Great book doesn’t mention enterprise architects but just talks […]
What do we mean by the term ‘process’? What is a process? For that matter, what isn’t a process? This came up in a great Skype-conversation today with Kevin Smith, creator of PEAF (the Pragmatic EA Framework), about yet another LinkedIn somewhat-circular…
Current mainstream enterprise-architecture [EA] is broken, more broken and yet more broken, and has real problems with wickedness. But what can we do about this? How can we mend EA, make it unbroken? As in those posts linked-to above, I’d…
How do we cope with the wickedness of enterprise-architecture? I don’t mean here the implicit wickedness of people promoting term-hijacks and other half-baked notions as ‘the truth’ of enterprise-architecture – though heaven-knows there’s enough of that wickedness around. I also…
Yesterday I saw a message on Twitter which created an emotional reaction of mine. I tried to answer in 140 letters (the magic of twitter), but failed. I was not able to express what I really felt and did not made my point, which caused (of course) anot…