Enterprise Architecture is nothing without Enterprise Architecture

As business matures and sourcing becomes the normal state of composing new business, building upon the greatness of others, we will see a rally towards “engineering” disciplines like enterprise architecture. Going above and beyond the first stage we will experience new insight in business strategy as we will have access to an ocean of explicit information and the tools to work with it.

I can guarantee that the statement W.Gibson made about “The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed”, is true, in this case at least. We are exploiting this cross breading between enterprise architecture and business strategy at this moment, even though most others haven’t tried going beyond the one or the other yet.

Each cell in the great framework is like a piece of the enterprise puzzle. Scrutinized by itself each piece is a mystery to the understanding of the whole. Put together with other pieces it becomes a picture of the whole enterprise or a picture of a particular part of the enterprise. Thus to create an understanding of more than just a single piece of the enterprise, several pieces has to be investigated

The art of architecture #6 simply says: To make sure the success of an entreprise architecture effort one should strive to express the heart of it in a “one liner”.

Others have written about the importance of one liners, not in the common understanding of what EA is but from the stance of strategy. Remember that my stance on EA is an EA focused on strategy where descriptive activities is just one part of the whole effort.

Kenichi Ohmae wrote in his classical work The mind of the strategist, “Inability to articulate a strategy in a single incisive, natural-sounding sentence is a sure sign that there is something wrong in the strategy itself”. More recently W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne wrote in the now famous book Blue Ocean Strategy, “a good way to test the effectiveness and strength of a strategy is to look at whether it contains a strong and authentic tagline”.

The more complex the solution, the more layers of complexity is needed to sustain status quo. We should not aim for the solution, rather we should aim for the gains of the solution. Thus using an indirect path, we shall find a solution devoid of complexity.

If enterprise architecture is the science side then enterprise design is the artistic side. Booth sides need nourishing to grow an enterprise practice beyond the simple limitations of current approaches to enterprise architecture.