The best non-technical analogy to explain the extent of the complexity of corporate IT assets is shown in this video:
After watching this two-minute video, your first reaction is probably like mine: amusement and awe over Joseph’s ingenuity. But once I was over the toddler’s cuteness, it came to me that Joseph’s machine can teach a lot about IT solutions. Read More
Structure not only increases our chance to success,
it makes us more efficient at it.’ – Marshall Goldsmith
When people discuss digital transformation, they talk mostly about innovation, agility and new technologies. Companies put a tremendous amount of effort into initiatives that should make them more agile and innovative, but most of the companies I know do not manage their innovation initiatives towards a big architectural picture. The overly complex structure of dependencies between innovation- and other projects, and between new technologies and legacy-IT, are not handled with intent. Just present a fancy technology to top-level executives. If it has a low time-to-market and includes AI, chances are high that you can do it. No matter if it’s integration with legacy IT results in unnecessary complexity, ‘technical debt’ that introduces a total cost of ownership that outnumbers the business benefits by far. No matter if it is architecturally sound.
Let’s have a closer look at what ‘architecturally sound’ means, what architecture is all about and why the concept of architecture is helpful, especially in the context of innovation: Read More
Over the last two years, business architecture became more and more well known in the (IT) architecture community. Many friends of mine who formerly named themselves ‘Enterprise Architects’ start to use ‘Business Architect’ or ‘Enterprise Business Architect’ on their business card. But what does this mean? Is the discipline of Enterprise Architecture and their weak foundation on immature frameworks about to be replaced by Business Architecture? Is the work done by businessarchitectureguild.org gaining more and more importance? Has the concept of ‘architecture’ finally achieved it’s dedicated goal – the mind of business people?
For sure, Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is still a very immature, weakly defined field. Most of the methods, tools, and frameworks suit the requirements of real-world projects only to a small degree. Most of the elements EAM tries to structure and manage towards a to-be state’ are abstract and hard to grasp. Archimate®, a modeling notation for EAM, for example, defines more than thirty elements, most of them are vague abstractions and far from tangible. In practice, EAM is much more focused on designing application landscapes than providing a holistic view of the enterprise. EAM is still very much about ‘application portfolio management’ that tries to minimize IT costs without alignment to the business capabilities.
But how can this sad situation be changed?
Our suggestion is to apply three values to your EAM practice: Read More
Today I want to point to an article of Svyatoslav Kotusev, an independent researcher, who questions whether the Open Group Architecture Framework® (TOGAF®) is the industry standard framework that enterprise architects really deserve.
https://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/55547
In light of these findings the growing popularity of TOGAF® can hardly be attributed to the real usefulness of its advice, but rather to a lack of any better alternative sources on EA.
The Architectural Thinking Framework® wants to become an alternative, open source on EA that is based on the real-world experience of many practitioners.
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: