When you set out on doing an enterprise architecture, if the architecture is long in coming even if you are solving the problem, then the design will become dull and the stakeholders as well as the architects excitement will be damped. If you work from only one possible scenario, you will quickly exhaust your advantage and shorten the life of your design. Thus do many scenarios lead to success, and few scenarios to failure.
Now, when your designs are dulled, your excitement damped, your strength exhausted and your budget spent, other voices will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue. Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in projects, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays. There is no instance of a company having benefited from prolonged architecture projects.
It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the efforts of architecture projects that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on. The skillful architect does not raise a second budget, he knows the perils of ill resource management. At first you use the resources assigned from central authority, then you finance your work through the services delivered.
Poverty of the enterprise architecture causes a solution to be governed by regulations from a weak foundation. Contributing to maintain a solution built upon a weak foundation causes the users to be impoverished. On the other hand, to rich an enterprise architecture causes the cost of a solution to go up; and high costs cause the user’s profit to be drained away.
In architecture, then, let your great object be designs that acts as the foundation to great solutions, not lengthy projects. Thus it may be known that the leader of architects is the arbiter of the user’s fate, the man on whom it depends whether the company shall be in peace or in peril.
You can read Section One here: http://enklare.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/the-art-of-enterprise-architecture-section-one-strategy/
The text above is based upon the writings of Sun Tzu in the Art of War. Several translations has been read prior to writing the text above, but the most prominently used translation is the one retrieved from “http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War_(Sun)”. I consider the text above a work in progress…
[...] You can read Section Two here: section-two-doing-architecture [...]
[...] You can read Section Two here: section-two-doing-architecture [...]
[...] You can read Section Two here: section-two-doing-architecture [...]
[...] You can read Section Two here: section-two-doing-architecture [...]
[...] You can read Section Two here: section-two-doing-architecture [...]