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Challenging Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise Architecture is non sense - semantically I mean.
Architecture is about drawing plans to raise a building - something stable that needs just to be kept clean and sane until it costs less to level it and build a new one.
An enterpise shares very few commonalities with buildings. It is a social living organism t which is not shaped by an Architect, but results of a continuous evolution
An other issue is that EA is an IT discipline even when stated otherwise. Actually, IT "systems" can somewhat and partially be engineered according to an architecture, .
This is not to say that EA is irrelevant outside IT asset management. The many existing frameworks cannot merely be pure intellectual fantasy. My assumptions are the following:
- IT is becomming highly critical, potentially powering local and systemic intelligence in incommensurable scale
- Failing to properly releasing this power hides this for the time being. Enterprises managers do not realize this importance and consider IT as a commodity that can even be outsourced
- Acting correspondingly, IT managers make their best to fulfill services explicitly requested or supposed to best support the business
- They trigger EA effort to understand what the business really is, what the requirements are actually, and how to prioritize these requirements (not mentioning the IT side of EA)
- EA deliverables are inevitably out of date when released because an enterprise evolves faster than any mostly manual, asynchronous attempt to catch the changes.
- The response to business needs is always out of phase - the EA effort delaying action and preventing agile behavior requested to sync information support with continuous, fast evolution of the enterprise - as a painter who tries to represent a cloudy sky that conforms to its current appearance.
I have not yet succeeded finding a new term expressing useful ideas in EA such as the following:
- An enterprise is a complex system, an organism with systemic intelligence that drives its survival. It is concerned by two Darwinian progress/selection processes (external) of its own existence and (internal) of its objective knowledge - models, methods, rules, culture... - that conditions its success in the first process.
- This knowledge selection/progress process depends on the ability to create and retrieve knowledge - which is achieved by allowing proper representation of this knowledge and subsequent interactions, a language.
- The language shall be defined and continuously maintained as a true inventory of the necessary concepts to handle this knowledge
- All interactions - specifically bewteen IT solutions (interfaces) - use this language that references global concepts locally represented variously
- These interactions become the driver of knowledge progress and systemic intelligence - not only problematic interfaces
From a central function focused on the development and maintenance of the enterprise language, the business local applications can contribute efficiently to the increase of Enterprise systemic intelligence by facilitating the collect, storage, and delivery of the knowledge thanks the the formal interpretation of global concepts of the language in their local logical representations.
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Johann Sebastian Bach. the music closest to silence, closest, in spite of its being so highly organized, to pure, one-hundred-degree proof Spirit" (Aldous Huxley, Island)