Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a relatively new profession compared to others such as project management, engineering, law and medicine. Over the last two decades, interest in EA has been steadily growing for various reasons and at the same time debate among practitioners has also been growing as what is the scope of EA, how do we measure its performance and how do we validate the value of our services and so on. I believe it is time to ask ourselves about the evolution of the profession: 1) should we allow the profession to evolve naturally or 2) should we apply well-known design methods and let its evolution be guided by sound principles? The purpose of this article is to propose a straw-man model for making EA a profession and initiate discussions with a wider community that will lead to a comprehensive roadmap for doing so.

Architecture Expeditions: a Difference That Makes a Difference
By Leo Laverdure and Alex Conn, Ph.D.

Training of architects improves their architectural knowledge and skills. We know this because we test it. What we don’t test is the impact this training has on the organization. Has its architectural capability improved? Has business performance improved? Too often, the ideas learned in training simply fail to take root: individuals learn but nothing really changes. Why? Because organizations resist change. To overcome this resistance, we must engage the organization in the change effort. In particular, how do you sign up senior management? They are looking for measurable improvements to the business and will want to see evidence. Who has done this before? What results did they get? How did they make it work? What can we learn from them? Can we make it work here? An “architecture expedition” is a potentially valuable approach that addresses these concerns. An expedition is a topic-specific, action-focused program, lasting several months, designed to help front-line teams make rapid improvements in key performance metrics. Unlike our current, out-of-context model of training, in expeditions architects learn as they measurably improve the organization’s architecture capability—and, most importantly, business results. Expeditions have an important educational component. But rather than having instructors and learners, everyone learns from everyone. And the instructor role changes from source of knowledge (a “sage on the stage”) to expedition leader (a “guide on the side”) who coaches the participants in achieving the desired improvements.

The PRISM Architecture Framework – was it the very first Enterprise Architecture Framework?
By Roberto Rivera

This article introduces a little known architecture framework and development method called the PRISM Architecture Framework. This framework was published to a very limited research sponsor audience in 1986. The objective of this article is to bring this milestone achievement into the public light, as it not only is likely to be the very first enterprise architecture framework, but the results of the PRISM team research has had a far reaching influence in how we do architecture work today – and we didn’t even know it.

The Dutch State of the Practice of Architecture Principles
By Danny Greefhorst, Henderik Proper, Georgios Plataniotis

Architecture principles are the cornerstones of Enterprise Architecture and guide enterprises in their transformations. The Architecture Principles working group of the Dutch Architecture Forum (NAF) wanted to gain more insight into the current practice of architecture principles. To do this, the working group has performed a survey amongst practitioners. The survey results show how practitioners actually specify architecture principles, how they value them and what other areas of applications they see for principles. This article provides an overview of the most interesting results of the survey. In addition, it provides insights gained from a workshop that was organized in which the survey results were presented.

Book Review
“fit: an architect’s manifesto” By Robert Geddes
Reviewed by Len Fehskens

The applicability of ideas from conventional architecture to the enterprise is a recurring theme in discussions about enterprise architecture. Too often though, such discussions provide few insights because most enterprise architects know so little about what “real” architecture is about. This stylish little book may be the answer to this problem.

Book Review
Beyond Alignment: Applying Systems Thinking in Architecting Enterprises
Reviewed By Richard Veryard

One of the most popular memes in Enterprise Architecture is the notion of Alignment – for example the “alignment” between business and technology. But what is this “alignment”, and why should we care about it? There have been many initiatives recently to explore possible interworking between Enterprise Architecture and Systems Thinking, and I have been involved in some of these initiatives myself. So I was delighted to be invited to review this collection of papers. The contributors represent a range of different schools of Systems Thinking, including System Dynamics, Soft Systems Methodology and Cybernetics, with several contributors featuring the Viable Systems Model developed by Stafford Beer.

2013

Journal of Enterprise Architecture

November 2012 – February 2013

May 2013

August 2013

November 2013

Leave a Comment Cancel reply