Strange, Our Enterprise Architecture Continues to Operate
Wednesday, September 15th, 2010For years we’ve been hearing about the importance of Enterprise Architecture (EA) frameworks. The messages from a variety of sources such as Zachman, TOGAF, HL7 and others is that businesses have to do an incredible amount of planning, documenting, discussing, benchmarking, evaluation, (feel free to insert more up-front work here) before they will have a good basis to implement their IT infrastructure. Once implemented all the documentation must be maintained, updated, verified, expanded, improved, (once again, insert more ongoing documentation management work here). Oh, by the way, your company may want some actual IT work aligned with its core operations to be accomplished as part of all this investment. I don’t believe such a dependency is covered well in any of the EA material.
I have always struggled with these EA frameworks. Their overhead seems completely unreasonable. I agree that planning the IT infrastructure is necessary. This is no different than planning any sort of infrastructure. Where I get uncomfortable is in the incredible depth and precision these frameworks want to utilize. IT infrastructures do not have the complete inflexibility of buildings or roads. Computer systems have a malleability that allows them to be adapted over time, particularly if the adjustments are in line with the core design.
Before anyone concludes that I do not believe in having a defined IT architecture let me assure you that I consistently advocate having a well-planned and documented IT architecture to support the enterprise. A happenstance of randomly chosen and deployed technologies and integrations is inefficient and expensive. I just believe that such planning and documentation do not need to be anywhere near as heavyweight as the classical EA frameworks suggest.
So you can imagine, based on this brief background, that I was not particularly surprised when the Zachman lawsuit and subsequent response from Stan Locke (Metadata Systems Software) failed to stop EA progress within Blue Slate or any of our clients. I’m not interested in rehashing what a variety of blogs have already discussed regarding the lawsuit. My interest is simply that there may be more vapor in the value of these large frameworks than their purveyors would suggest.