The Great Master Lea was sitting on his mountain top basking in the sun. Late this morning, verging on the brink of  lunch a group of business people and Enterprise Architects had come before him to ask a question. This is what they asked: “Oh great master Lea, why would it matter to us if we work in different ways?” The great master Lea looked at the group of business people and Enterprise Architects then turned his head towards the sky and said: “If you do not act as one then it is always a question of integration.”

To much time and effort is spent on looking far in to the future. Often enough fixated on a single target architecture, a to-be state that has little to do with the way business is actually being done. It’s time we start utilizing the tools we’ve got to work with rolling architectures. The dynamics of business and supporting structures like IT are well able to get to grips with an ever changing market.

We can make a serious impact on the strategic outcome by acknowledging the fact that the enterprise clocks all work at different speeds, resulting in at least eleven intertwined life cycles that need to be aligned. The skills and tools of the architects is well attuned with aligning all the little pieces and all the big pieces into a continuous transition plan.

Good things that we all do

• Application life cycle management
• Portfolio and project management
• Enterprise Architecture
• Product life cycle management
• Strategic planning

Good things that we can do

• Enterprise continuous life cycle alignment
• Enterprise continuous transition plan

Ways of executing

John Boyds event loop named the OODA loop is a thinking model well adapted to handle the overall problem of intertwined life cycles.

Note that the cycles of the loop is not single instances. There are infinite cycles going on at every time.

If we where to try the OODA loop on our work it might look something like below. To make it a bit easier on the people we could assume that the loop speed would start with monthly iterations, then we could go down to every fortnight and after that every week and after that every other day ending with every day. The aim would off course be to do the loop instantaneously.

Observation
As part of our normal work routine we should enter data, updating the organisations repository with information about every change we came into contact with. The “All” in this case is all levels in the organisation, definitely not just architects.

Orientation
Continously the data in the repository would be analyzed, by the architects 

Decision
Each cycle a decision to create new releases of the repository matching the outcome of the orientation would be taken.

Action
Each cycle, programs and projects would be handed updated directives with detailed instructions.

Notes

Many may say that this is all a state of nirvana. It does not have to be. If we combine the best we have in people, knowledge, information, tools then it can be achieved. Remember that some companies have thrown out their budget work and use rolling quarters instead, no one thought that would be easy either.

Near instantaneous loops demand a responsive organisation, so if you’re doing projects and programs with steering groups and committees then you’d probably have to rethink your method.

Apparently good things are happening in the field of enterprise architecture.

“The board of the ArchiMate Foundation and the board of The Open Group have expressed their intentions to adopt ArchiMate as an independent standard for enterprise architecture modelling and analysis under the aegis of The Open Group”

You can read the ArchiMate newsletter here.

Adrian has some good thoughts on this topic