Guiding Principles | Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

Will integrating “generative” attributes help EA adoption?

Jun 252009

JP Rangaswami wrote an interesting post titled Mother of Invention. In it he discusses, Frank Zappa and piracy and as usual, he expands my understanding on this contentious topic. Thank you JP!

What really caught my eye was JP’s reference to Kevin Kelly’s article Better than Free. Kevin talks about the Internet being a super-distribution system where once a copy is introduced it flows freely forever. So when everything is free or as close to free as possible, how do we make money? Kevin’s solution is pretty simple …

“When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.”

Next Kevin talks about “generatives”. Here is his definition:

“A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time.”

Kevin proposes 8 “generatives” listed below (please read Kevin’s article for the details on each):

Immediacy
Personalization
Interpretation
Authenticity
Accessibility
Embodiment
Patronage
Findability

This really got me thinking about how we approach introducing and maturing enterprise architecture in our organizations. How many of you made attempts to introduce EA practices and struggled in your organizations? What do you do to attract clients to your EA service? Do you use a carrot or a stick? Why would people in your organization come to you for services?

Can we take Kevin’s “generatives” and apply them as principles of our EA practice? In a future post, I will comment on how I think applying Kevin’s “generatives” as guiding principles to delivering Enterprise Architecture.

If applications, services and technology are freely available in the cloud, why would our clients come to us? What can we create in an Enterprise Architecture service that is immediate, personalized, interpreted, authentic, accessible, aligned, appreciative and attributable?

What good looks like … follow-up

enterprise architecture 3 Responses »

May 252009

Alan Inglis posted about What good looks like from a solutions architecture perspective. How do you create a solution for a new project without creating architecture that already exists or making the same mistakes that previous projects made? This is a must read post and I recommend it.

Alan described 10 artefacts that he would expect a solutions architect to leave behind from a project implementation. They are:

Project Background
Terminology
Key Drivers, Principles, Standards and Constraints
Business Problem
Information View
Risk View
Application View
Data View
Integration View
Infrastructure View

I have some questions for Alan on this:

How big a project would require this level of artefact creation? For small and possibly medium projects, the work to do the architecture may be more than delivering the project.
Is there a subset of these artefacts that would be sufficient for small and medium projects?
How would the next solutions architect find and assess the artefacts created? Need a searchable, secured repository – wiki?, blog?, SharePoint?, network file share?, knowledge base?

We, Enterprise Architects, regular trumpet the value of having an archictecture and learning from it. Some of the key factors for me would be:

ensuring that there is time for solution architects and enterprise architects to work together to do peer reviews: 1) pre-project, 2) technical reviews in a project and 3) post-project
communication of agreed upon standards and principles is essential to build a common language
negotiating with functional managers to ensure time is allocated to every project for architecture
regularly demonstrating value to the organization by taking an enterprise, long term view

EA Environmental Scan (Top 5 Future EA Trends) … a very late summary

enterprise architecture, it governance, strategic planning 2 Responses »

Jan 052008

First, thanks to everyone who contributed via the Shared Insights EANetwork. I originally posted this on September 16, 2007. I got swamped and did not post my list so here it is:

Trends and Impacts

Trend – More stakeholders are connecting EA thinking (alignment of technology to support strategic goals) with business innovation and investments in change.
Impact – EA will become embedded into the planning, procurement, implementation and delivery of services.
Trend – Enterprise Architects more rare that IT architects. Growing your own EA might prove to be more successful than recruiting one
Impact – Coaching, mentoring and training of internal staff to become IT strategic thinkers will help grow Enterprise Architects. Is there a path? Project Technical Lead to IT Domain Architect to IT Solutions Architect to Enterprise Architect to Chief Architect?
Trend – More acquisition of COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf) technologies that are build for configuration and integration instead of requiring customization
Impact – Configurable technology allows more time for upfront Business Analysis to gather the right requirements and simpler, more manageable ongoing support and maintenance.
Trend – Maturing of IT Governance within organizations with EA linking people, process and technology to support strategy. EA Guiding Principles are widely understood by decision makers and become policy.
Impact – Enterprise Architects within organizations need to collaboratively develop EA Guiding Principles and EA Approval processes for technology acquisition. We use the following : REUSE before ACQUIRE before CREATE
Trend – Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) technology matures and becomes reliable for mainstream solutions. Enterprise Architects will use SOA to create serviced based solution architectures with reuse as the guiding principle.
Impact – EA’s need to architect small pilot SOA solutions in the near term so that in the longer term when an ERP or CRM vendor decides to go the SOA route, they are well versed in the impact to their organizations.

Thanks again and I suppose we should update this post annually! Happy New Year!