Blog

Enterprise Architecture is still a mystical discipline, ruled by vague frameworks, surrounded by the fog of bloated concepts providing only little practical advice.

Let’s hand over to our friend, Nemanja Kostic who provides a humorous overview about the state of the practice. He makes suggestions that discuss how to demystify Enterprise Architecture,. This suggestions are quite compatible with our vision of Architectural Thinking.

http://www.entarchs.com/blog/demystifying-enterprise-architecture.html

What you should do:

• heavily downsize the architecture meta-model. Focus your models and maps on value streams, capabilities, business objects, applications, technology components. It is enough to build a great! enterprise architecture practice.
• build a lean but strict governance that welcomes the architecture work of many members of solution teams.
• get out of the ivory tower. Sell the idea and significance of architecture to your agile teams and to business people.

Most IT landscapes of larger companies consist of hundreds of applications that are interconnected via poorly designed interfaces. In most companies, these IT landscapes already have an enormous technical debt (see Bob Martin’s Blog), i.e., an ‘unnecessary complexity’. In my experience, a company typically runs between 80% and 90% more IT applications (and therefore also servers, databases, networks, costs) compared to what would be needed if it had implemented the ideal architecture. A tremendous waste of money and resources, and the reason why IT is perceived as tardy and as a cost factor and not as an enabler.

The following figure shows schematically what typical application landscapes of medium to large companies today look like:

Read More

The Architectural Thinking Association® is proud to launch the first draft of the Architectural Thinking Framework® which is a truly open, lightweight architectural framework that is based on the experience of many practitioners.

The Architectural Thinking Framework® has the goal to ensure that all the solutions of a company fit together in order to balance the dimensions (i) customer value, (ii) finance and (iii) sustainability in a way that maximizes the overall value from an enterprise-wide viewpoint in the short and the long term.

Read More