Notes on John Zachman’s Enterprise Architecture presentation at BCS EA specialist group meeting

As advertised in my notes from the last BCS EA specialist group event, myself and my Smart421 colleague (David Taylor, head of our internal WebSphere practice) attended this evening’s John Zachman presentation at Sun’s offices in London. I felt it was too good a chance to miss as I’ve not seen John present before – regardless of whether you agree with him or not, every self-respecting EA needs to have seen him at least once I think, and usually you have to shell out some hard-won training/conference budget to do so. I must admit I was expecting quite a hard sales pitch from him, having seen collateral for all the Zachman Framework materials and courses etc, and because he’s American …but this was not the case, and so I humbly apologise for my stereotypical assumptions.

He is a bit of a handful though – Mike Buck did his best to ‘manage’ John at the end – whilst the sandwiches outside started to curl up at the edges. As I expected he is a very engaging speaker, with some great anecdotes from his career and he spoke passionately about enterprise architecture. He kept speaking at a quite frightening rate and intensity for about 100 minutes, going 100mph and hammering home his messages using those good old speaking techniques of repetition, comedy and metaphor. I was glad I wasn’t at the front of the audience as I suspect that was a bit full-on – it’s a bit like when you go an see a stand-up comic – always best to sit a few rows back…

So what about the content? Well, he basically covered the need to enterprise architecture as a discipline and then spent the majority of the time explaining the Zachman Framework and the justification for it. So for most people in the room, I suspect they didn’t really hear anything new. It was really quite odd to hear him refer to that thing that we’ve all grown up with, the Zachman Framework, as “my framework”. There was no content about how to execute an enterprise architecture process and his viewpoint seems quite academic in nature. In his motivating way, for a moment you are led to feel that you could “model the world” – until your real world experiences kick in and you realise that this is nonsense in almost all current business environments. I must admit I feel bad criticising John Zachman in any way – it feels like complaining about your (very sharp, clever, transatlantic) grandad. To be fair to him, he didn’t try and cover the ‘delivery’ topic at all and could not of done so in the time he had. He’d be a great guy to wheel out in front of your CEO to ’sell’ the idea of enterprise architecture to them, but you also get the impression that you don’t want to be the guy following up on the expectations he might have created. He neatly side-stepped a few audience questions, but you got the impression he had the answers if not the time to give them, e.g. the classic cross-cutting concerns challenge such as ‘how is security architecture represented in the framework?’. I was quite impressed that he openly volunteered that the framework was an ontology but not a method – whilst this is obvious, I thought he might spin this towards a method of his choosing but he didn’t try that at all.

In some ways the asides, anecdotes and little historical lessons were the most riveting part of the presentation – he talked about the process by which he originally “discovered” the framework, the reasons he changed some things in version 2 of it such as renaming some of the terms to make them more business-relevant and less IT-centric, and the history of System R, DB2, IMS, business process modelling and so on. Overall I am very glad I went…I’m richer for the experience although my ears do feel like they’ve been assaulted. Another excellent and very well attended BCS EA SG event – well done committee.

 

Enterprise Architecture case studies – Notes from BCS EA specialist group meeting

As threatened, I attended the BCS Enterprise Architecture specialist group meeting in London near Covent Garden yesterday. There were two interesting presentations regarding EA case studies, both of which caused lots of debate and questions from the gathered audience.

Amit Apte from SITA presented an anonymised case study from the airline industry. As is always a good idea, he started off with a provocation – that “enterprise architecture is boring” – and I think he was a little disappointed with the lack of reaction he got to that statement. I tend to agree to the extent that if it’s all done well, then it should be largely mechanical in nature and so rather dull. However in general this is not the case – in fact it is far too exciting! But the key thing that attracts me to EA is the ability to influence with a more significant level of impact, e.g. stopping the wrong change projects and starting the right ones, rather than operating at a solution architecture level and only influencing with a smaller scope. Maybe it’s a power thing, anyway…

He got a fair amount of stick from the audience about whether this was really an overview of an EA initiative or a one-off enterprise-wide solution architecture that had used a modified version of TOGAF v8 as a method, and the discussion centred around whether a sustainable EA function had been created or not.

Andrew Jolly from Deloitte presented an anonymised case study from the TMT (technology, media, and telecom) sector – concerning the creation of an EA governance capability in an organisation of circa 29k staff/partner staff. Some interesting things came out…

• Both presentations mentioned something like “the business don’t need to know about EA”, i.e. a rather depressing but not unusual admission that selling the concept of EA to the business community is in the too hard pile. Andrew added to this with the sage comment that brand awareness for your EA initiative with the wider stakeholder community is key though, even if it is a meaningful acronym. Call it A.A.R.D.V.A.R.K. (I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader to come up with) or whatever, but call it something so they can hang a label on what you are doing for them.
• The usual general advice applied – start small to demonstrate value, winning over hearts and minds by demonstration of real value rather than selling potential future value. The good old “virtuous circle” that Smart421 (and especially Richard Latham) have been banging the drum about. I was going to ask about metrics etc but someone else got in before me – and got the answer I expected which was they set up some KPIs at the start, but eventually the qualitative measures took over, i.e. did the projects the EA function had cherry-picked to engage with ‘feel’ that they were adding sufficient value.
• One of your selection criteria for where to start is on a project where you have influence (probably by chance, e.g. you know the project manager personally etc).
• As a mechanism of starting to embed the idea of architects contributing to projects/programmes, Andrew’s suggestion was that you could provide a ‘free’ architect as projects will never turn away free resource. You need to ensure they are a good resource and then some benefit will naturally emerge and the project will see it, and so be more likely to ask for (and then pay for) architecture input next time round. Obviously this requires some seed funding which is non-trivial to find.
• Even in what may appear to be an organisation that appears architecturally doomed initially, there are generally people inside the organisation who are performing a psuedo-architecture role some of their time even if they haven’t got the title and wondrous benefits package that goes with it. Otherwise how has the enterprise made it this far? Get these guys involved in some kind of virtual team as they hold the keys to your initial EA artefacts.
• Publish EA materials early – don’t wait for perfection as you’ll never get there. Even if they’re wrong an early viewing so that they get ripped to bits (hopefully not too badly) and then improved is a good thing. Obviously they’ve got to be of a certain quality though. This point really reminded me of the practice recommended I read in a book from Guy Kawasaki about releasing new products to market early, which is completely common practice in the software industry. His quote – “Revolutionary products don’t fail because they are shipped too early; they fail because they are not revised fast enough”. Hence never buy a vs.0…
• What was the biggest risk to the EA function that had now been established? Andrew’s view was that it was “taking our eye off the ball” and losing sight of the fact that the roadmap for the EA function itself must be maintained and pursued – just like the other roadmaps that the EA function might generate for business architecture etc.

Andrew’s parting message was an interesting one – that putting in place an EA capability is a business change project in itself and so should be treated as such, i.e. get the organisation’s “change” people involved to execute the business change.

It was good to put some faces to the names of some more of the the movers and shakers in the UK EA world – I can now point Amit, Andrew, Tom Graves and Sally Bean out of a line-up if required…

Specialist group chairman Mike Buck mentioned that the next event is a presentation by the grand-daddy of EA, a certain Mr John Zachman on October the 6th, so I expect that event to be very well attended…

 

BCS Enterprise Architecture meeting tomorrow

I’ll be attending the BCS EA specialist group meeting tomorrow (10th Sept 2009) at 18:00, 5 Southampton Street, London – at this meeting there will be a presentation of case studies from specialist group members focusing on the following areas:

• Business value delivered by EA
• Professional development for enterprise architects
• Governance of enterprise architecture

I’m looking forward to meeting my EA peers, and I’m keen to hear different perspectives on questions such as these…

• If the EA effort has been going for a while, are they entering the “trough of disillusionment” and how have they addressed this?
• What was the trigger event that meant they got funding/energy for an EA initiative? New CEO? A big disaster that they were rebounding from?
• Are they well engaged with project/programme teams?
• Architecture and/or project governance in place? Working well?
• Centralised or decentralised model?
• What lessons have they learned?
• Views on TOGAF and other frameworks?
• Any relationship to business process improvement teams, six sigma initiatives etc?
• Budget, team size etc
• EA cycle times
• Communication approach?
• Metrics in place?

 

BCS Enterprise Architecture Specialist Group – Inaugural meeting

Last evening another colleague from Smart421 (Nathan Pinkney) and I attended this inaugural meeting of the British Computer Society Enterprise Architecture specialist group in Leeds at the Met Hotel. The evening consisted of the procedural activities required to set up a new specialist group as part of the BCS, followed by a presentation.

The procedural aspects were interesting in themselves, as I learned about the scrutiny applied to organisations who have charitable status such as the BCS, and therefore the degree of rigour required in the constitution of the group, financial controls etc. Thanks are definitely due to Mike Buck and the other committee members for getting the group to the birthing pool…

But the most interesting parts of the evening were when debates and discussions kicked off concerning various aspects of the purpose of the group, and therefore enterprise architecture in general. The diversity of the audience surprised me – the turnout was good at about 30+ people of the 280 or so BCS members who have signed up to be part of the group. The level of debate showed that there was some great minds out there, which encouraged me as I wasn’t sure what the mix of skills/experience levels was going to be like. There’s something you get from chatting to your peers across other industry sectors that you just cannot get from any other source…I talked to people with an EA interest from a military perspective, banking (they got a “boo hiss”!), trading etc. It was great!

The key discussions that came out were:

• The dreaded definition of EA vs IT architecture – eventually we managed to move on from this once will all agreed that it wasn’t massively productive. As it is necessarily mentioned in the group’s constitution – this was bound to come up.
• Selling the benefits of EA – there was lots of healthy debate about whether it was arrogant of people from an IT background to claim a stake in the business architecture world, and whether this was credible. For me, this debate really brought out the different perspectives of the audience, e.g. when examples were used to amplify a point, they were almost exclusively IT examples, even though most of the group were saying that IT architecture was just a subset of enterprise architecture.
• The group was not about creating yet another EA framework, i.e. a BCSEAF – thank God for that. There’s enough of them out there – it’s the application of them and the benefits that flow from them that is key IMHO.
• The fact that the British Computer Society was the vehicle being used to progress EA in the UK was interesting – and in general we agreed that whilst this rather laid bare the IT heritage that the EA discipline has, it was the best and most obvious vehicle we had. An interesting analogy put forward by one attendee was the journey that project management has made – i.e. from being managing IT projects, to now a broad acceptance that we manage ‘change’, and IT change is just part of a project.

The presentation at the end was by Judith Jones of Architecting the Enterprise, a TOGAF training organisation that happens to be Smart421’s preferred training provider for TOGAF. As you’d expect, the presentation was very TOGAF-centric and 50%+ a sales pitch, and didn’t really address it’s key question (“EA in the credit crunch”) – but it still provided me with a few thought provoking moments where things that I’d realised but not really crystalised in my head became clear. I’ll write about these some other time…

I’m delighted that two of my colleagues from Smart421 (Nathan Pinkney and John Rutter) have been voted in as part of the committee so that we can give this fledgling group our support. I admire their energy . Let’s see where we can take it.

 

BCS Enterprise Architecture Specialist Group inaugural meeting this week

Together with another EA colleague from Smart421, I’ll be attending the inaugural meeting of the BCS Enterprise Architecture Specialist Group this week on Wednesday in Leeds. We’ve also lined up another one of our EAs to present at a future event. I’m looking forward to meeting al the UK EA “movers and shakers” and seeing where this group goes…and it’s nice to be in at the start and see where we can all take it.

Thanks are due to Mike Buck for pulling this group together. More details are available at www.ea.bcs.org.uk.