Enterprise Architecture:A Slightly Different Approach
My objective as an IT Architect (ITA) is to make sure the money spent on IT delivers a good return on the investment. The variety of ITA disciplines contribute to this in different ways; and it is no different for Enterprise Architecture (EA).
So what is different about the approach, as hinted in the title?
EA is about Information – information about the enterprise, information that will help to make informed decisions at an enterprise scale. Following is a roadmap to for building up and maintaining this information about the enterprise.
- Most of the EA tools available today offer a “ivory tower” approach to enterprise information – available only to a few, controlled access, narrow and predefined views – often for the purposes of management information, reporting or documentation.
What if there was a different way to harness the crowd in the enterprise to capture and maintain the information about the enterprise? A working example of such is Wikipedia - taking a different approach at harvesting humanity’s encyclopedic knowledge of our world through the powers of the community and crowd. - This previous point is certainly doable, many Intranets (even enterprise wiki’s) offer more or less this already, but where is the architecture in this? How is this not going to end up just a pile of information junk. How to put the structure around this to make sense of it and enable decision making?
IT Architecture – more specifically Enterprise Architecture in this case – can provide the much needed structure to make the information useful for decision making in the form of an EA meta-model or EA ontology. - As it happens, wiki’s can master ontologies when extended with semantic features. MediaWiki (as well as other implementations) have a Semantic Wiki extension to support semantically linked information. As for the EA ontology – it can be based on any of the EA models and meta-models available in the open.
- Once the technical elements, the infrastructure, is available; the people and process aspects remain to make it work.
- For the people part:
- Allow both creation and consumption of information to everybody in the enterprise. Most of this activity already happens in one form or another – design documents, process maps, procedures, etc. – only these are fragmented, vary in quality and availability. People will recognize the value in creating and contributing information in a place where they see the return.
- Employ EA skills to re-factor the content contributed by everybody. EA folks are familiar with the EA meta-model, the value of information and how to make it accessible through classification, structuring and querying. They can take all the input and enrich, annotate and markup the parts to establish the structure.
- For the process part:
- For most folks in the enterprise there will not be any process – at least not visible to them – and that is also part of the idea about the different approach.
- For the EA team, they will have to establish efficient practices to process and re-factor the incoming content and turn that into sensible information for decision making.
- They will have to listen to the questions and find the answers in the EA model and in the linked information. Also part of this work is to produce the output and actually show the architecture of the enterprise reflected in the answers.
This entry is just a first of many on the topic of how to make this different approach real and working.
It is no secret or surprise that the technical aspect is more or less in place already, the people and process parts are coming next…
April 17th, 2011 at 6:45 pm
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