Caution workforce in the road!
What would your reaction be if the workforce in the road, fixing the road, did not have any tools or machines to do the job?
Frustration at the waste of time in the resulting traffic queue?
What would be your reaction if the washing machine repair man turned up without his tool kit, without a diagram of the appliance and without access to spare parts?
Refuse to pay the bill?
A security company providing security without enough staff
Questions in Parliament?
How is that so many Enterprise Architects can do their job without the tools of their trade?
Often Enterprise Architects are missing vital parts of their tool kit:
- Standards
- Principles
- Reference architectures
- Models of the Organisation
- Application Landscape
- Analysis and design tools
- Information sources to feed the analysis tools
- Stakeholder analysis
Worse than this they seem to lack the basic tools to be able to create the EA tools they need such as the processes to maintain the models, principles, guidance and governance.
Do you wonder why EA gets a bad name?
I am not suggesting that we go back to the old EA approaches
- Boil the ocean documenting the current state
- Tons of detailed standards (always out of date)
- Heavy handed governance that increases costs, misses deadlines and the point
And any of the other EA anti-patterns
Togaf 9.x of course points us at lots of artefacts and things to do, it is supposed to. We do not have to do them all, we can mix and match – What happens when we mix and match ourselves out of TOGAF9.x in all but name? Are we no longer doing architecture?
There are precedents for this situation:
SSADM was created and adopted, but everyone picked the bits they liked or could do. No one could afford to complete the whole SSADM – Especially with paper and pencil (there were few tools around). SSADM became discredited; Every claim of compliance was subject to interpretation.
A similar thing happened to PRINCE.
I guess that there are many other examples of the dilution of the good practices until they are no longer effective.
Will this be the fate of TOGAF?
Are we architects no longer doing architecture?
October 28, 2012 at 2:03 pm
Richard Latham questions the relationship between #entarch practice and some body of knowledge. As if architects once did things properly but no longer do so. There are several issues here – which bits of which body of knowledge should architects be following, and what happens when they don’t. TOGAF may represent a significant part of the EA body of knowledge, but there are lots of rival approaches.
See my recent blog for a discussion on the evolution of the EA body of knowledge.
http://rvsoapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/on-enterprise-architecture-body-of.html
November 9, 2012 at 10:52 am
Richard Veryard is right to question the body of knowledge in #entarch and his is an interesting take on one of the ideas. I do agree with Richard, about the lack of rigour and engineering knowledge applied to EA.
My concern is a pragmatic one – That many practicing EAs do not have the basic tools to be able to do their job. If there is a job to be done and decisions to be made, the tools and information should be used to improve the decision and it outcome. Otherwise EAs can be likened to water diviners or other practitioners of mystical arts.
We (Richard Veryard and myself) may well contend that without the rigour of the body of knowledge all attempts at EA tend to approach the mystical. However, learning from past success and failure has over time steadily improved performance, even if we find out later that some of our beliefs are based on incorrect theories.
My other observation is that TOGAF appears to be following a similar progression and adoption path as other methods and frameworks that have gone before. Upon reflection, this kind of progression is probably inevitable and part of the natural evolution of human skill and the body of knowledge.
November 12, 2012 at 9:33 am
All that matters is the practical effect, a change in behaviour or practice that has a positive outcome. What names you associate with it and what methodology you draw from (patterns, togaf, DSDM, SSADM, or the one I like best ‘common sense’) doesn’t really amount to a ‘hill of beans’ unless you’re betting your credibility on how well you can remember passages from one of those weighty tomes. Computing is a practical profession, everything else is bluster.
If your ability to influence design and development activity and all other aspects of the DLC is limited not by your knowledge or weight of argument but by the power of individual projects who can disregard it without any kind of penalty clause, then this, rather than leaning on the psalms of wisdom enshrined in reputable text, is the problem architects need to address.
its where the rubber hit the road that counts not 60,000ft above it.