It’s been a while since I’ve managed to attend one of the BCS EA specialist group meetings, so it was good to make my way to Southampton Street for tonight’s meeting, which was a joint session with the BCS North London branch.
Both presentations were by EAs from Capgemini, and as always I got something out of both of them. Rob Rowe went first by giving a high-level view of the characteristics that an EA needs and what their role consists of (knitting fog, herding cats etc 
). As always, the audience questions provoked by the presentation were really interesting – the typical BCS audience contains a wide range of perspectives and disciplines. Much of the debate focused on the response…
…but if that’s what an Enterprise Architect does, I do that as well…
…where the claim was made by either a business analyst, solution architect, IT director, IT strategist or technical design authority. Bottom line – there’s clearly lots of overlap in these roles, and different organisations define these terms differently. It was also raised that the term “architect” shouldn’t really be used for legal reasons (but “architecture” was OK)…
Richard Noon then went through an interesting EA case study. The key theme from this presentation for me was about traceability – traceability from requirements (represented as use cases maybe, including NFRs, and a logical services catalog) through to the underpinning components and technical services that realise those requirements. It sounded like a great endeavour, and the architect designer in me liked the idea of being able to perform automated impact assessments of a change in one component by just querying an EA model. The idea of “one model to rule them all” is appealing to all modelers, but back in the real world I know that modeling the ar5e off everything rarely ends in a happy place…so I had to suspend my cynicism about how well any model would be maintained going forward etc. But I’m not knocking it – it was a compelling advert for the power of EA.
For a winter’s night in London the turnout was really good, and I’m pleased that so many people gave up their evenings (especially the two presenters) – even if it means you do have to have soup at Liverpool St on the way home…
