Suggestions to prove the “Architecture hypothesis”

Nick Malik asked the question Are we ready to prove the “Architecture hypothesis?”  I am intrigued by Nick’s call to action. Are we really ready to step up and take this on?

My suggestion would be to find some candidate architecture projects and come to a concensus on what we would choose for the experiment. I am sure there are some fundamental projects that we all need to deliver to our organizations that would be good candidates. 

The real challenge will be convincing some of us who are sold on EA to be the control group and not do the architecture as part of the project.

Some projects we could consider:

• building a web service to expose a core business process to customers
• integrating common data elements between two or more functional areas
• deploying a collaboration space or intranet
• publishing a performance dashboard
• implementing an Identity Access Management architecture
• ….

Nick, looking forward to your take on my suggestions … and everyone else too!

Related posts:

1. Enterprise Architecture Taxonomy
2. Enterprise Architecture Principles
3. Solutions Architecture … what does it look like?
4. How deep do you go?
5. Enterprise Architecture Roles or “What do you do??”