Mel Duval wrote a nice piece in Information Management about enterprise architecture (EA) and our book - http://www.information-management.com/news/-10016459-1.html – It’s entitled “Averting Disaster Through Enterprise Architecture.” Mel writes, " In all the debates about what drove the world economy into its worst recession in decades, rarely does the concept of enterprise architecture come into the discussion. Yet, perhaps it should."
Although there may be some truth in claiming "too big to fail" applies in the case of the still-standing among Bear, Fannie, Freddie, AIG, Merril, Citi, BofA, GM, Chrysler, and the rest of the cast of bankrupt characters, the greater truth is that they are too big to manage without enterprise-wide, integrated, and detailed models. The truth is that just about every part, as well as the whole, of these enterprises was profitable and management of every part and the whole were getting their incentive bonuses for a job well done. All were regulated too. Yet no one saw the risks to the whole enterprise, let alone the whole US and global economies, that were right in front of them, more or less plain as day.
Why was that? Short answer is "All we will ever know is our models." And our models did not take those connections or all those systemic risks into account. They were effectively invisible to all but a few. Among the blinded was economics professor and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, but now at least he recognizes the problem too and in his's 6-Sept-09 New York Times piece "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?" opines about the models and theories of "the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth."
EA is about modeling the whole enterprise, knowing all there is to know about it, its parts, and their interactions, whatever the goals or objectives of the enterprise may be. Yet our research (as reported in the SIM Guide to Enterprise Architecture - http://eawg.simnet.org/) indicates that only about 1/3 of IT people agree with that statement. Probably to be expected at this early stage in the adoption of EA concepts to managing enterprises and their technologies.
So what is EA and what is its purpose? Over the years we've come up with sound bites such as:
The purpose of EA is to provide the holistic set of descriptive representations about the enterprise over time. -- SIMEAWG (http://simeawg.simnet.org).
The purpose of EA is to “model” the enterprise. -- Leon Kappelman
The purpose of EA is to bridge the chasm between strategy and implementations -- Leon Kappelman
The purpose of EA is the creation of a shared language (of words and pictures) to communicate about, think about, and manage the enterprise. -- Leon Kappelman
Lately, though, I've been thinking that the greater "purpose of enterprise architecture is to bring all the IT people together, so they can bring all the rest of the people in the enterprise together." Getting "everyone on the same page" might be another way to say it, and certainly there are other ways too, but I think I'll stick with "bring ... together" for now.
But if the IT people can't even agree that EA is about the whole enterprise and not just its ITs, how will they ever come together, let alone help the rest of the people in the enterprise come together? I don't know the answer to that question, but I'm pretty sure it's going to take some time, happen incrementally, and that this article by Mel Duval will help. The SIM Guide to EA will help too. I'm glad we've gone to a second printing already. But non-IT enterprise management needs to get the message too. Because it’s the decisions of non-IT people that brought the economy to the brink, and many organizations far past it. I certainly hope some of them are listening, and reading up on using enterprise models to manage too, whether they call EA or something else.
