Countless times the Enterprise Architecture (EA) discussions end up in debates over some analogy trying to explain what EA is. The analogy often used is traditional architecture.

I am not a great fan of the traditional architecture analogies myself, by the way I feel the same way about the use of car manufacturing. These analogies often fail to meet the level of abstraction on the two sides of the analogy, and the conversation soon becomes a debate which architect designs the brick, or the piping; which one is responsible for a specific floor of a building, or is it the whole building, maybe the whole city? and it goes on and on…

At the same time, I have to admit whatever helps to get on the same page with a team of people will just work fine. To help the situation I have looked for materials on the Web to support the analogy. I have found the following PDF (size warning: 3.7MB), which I thought was brilliant in itself – it is a great piece of work (competition entry) from a team. It also supports the breadth and depth of architecture that can be related to the various IT architecture disciplines, including EA.

The link to the document is here. Unfortunately the original document is not available at the original location anymore, which was at http://udcompetition.uli.org/ under the 2004 archives. More designs can be found in more recent archives, under the results page.