In a recent enterprise architecture seminar in Boston, many of the participants were military personnel charged with the task of planning and managing the war against Iraq. While some delegates were surprised by the strong military presence, it made perfect sense to me. Various types of skills are required to orchestrate a large-scale battle, with supplies, personnel, intelligence, target coordinates and assets all needing to operate as a unit and to find their way to the front line.
Most businesses operate as if they were on a battlefield - ever changing and often in a state of chaos, with multiple war parties skirmishing across the landscape, unable to communicate with one another and totally reliant upon their own resources to survive.
Most businesses operate as if they were on a battlefield - ever changing and often in a state of chaos.
Craig Martin, MD, SiloFx Enterprise Architecture Solutions.
The US government uses enterprise architecture to ensure that the "harmony" of war is conducted in the most efficient and effective manner possible. No war or enterprise architecture exercise can be won in one sweep; to view the big picture, war and enterprise architects must break up the problem. They do this by using frameworks.
John Zachman, one of the fathers within the domain of architecture frameworks, has created a framework that is generally considered the de facto standard when starting an architecture endeavour. However, his is merely just that for some companies - a starting point. The framework that the US government uses is the C4ISR framework: The Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Framework.
You can start to see the complexity of integrating all of these areas across instances of battle within a war and why the quest for the most effective framework, model and blueprint is an ongoing endeavour among the architecture community.
By analysing the majority of these frameworks, it becomes clear that each unit is broken up into levels of complexity, and views. In order to cater for the "everything for everyone" concept defined in my previous Industry Insight, we need to ensure that architectures cater for different views and viewpoints. These are then applied or incorporated into the architecture through the framework, allowing the problem to be broken down into smaller chunks, and according to the different viewpoints of the stakeholders, ie viewholders.
Some architecture teams start their planning phases searching for the most efficient methodology. A more effective approach, however, is that before a methodology is chosen, a framework must be used or developed; in other words, we need to frame our thinking. This allows us to start at a particular view and level of complexity, populate and blueprint our architectures from that starting point using any methodology.
A significant weakness of a good deal of architecture projects is the unstructured approach to developing the blueprints. Levels of detail alter within each artefact and confusion results from an overall misunderstanding of the breakdown of the problem. The key to helping the architecture develop is to break it into these bite-sized chunks. You cannot be a big picture thinker until you`ve fully understood the level of detail of that picture and kept it consistent across your solution. Starting, therefore, at the wrong point is often not where the fault lies; rather, it`s the jumping around between views, viewpoints, layers and complexities that causes the problems.
The choice of frameworks and methodologies falls under the domain of an architecture strategy. It is imperative that you define an architecture strategy before you fly head first into attempting anything within the domain of an enterprise architecture planning approach. This strategy must be communicated to all parties involved, specifically the business. It is the business that it will affect the most, because the business drives the technology just as your architecture strategy drives your architectures.
Communication, however, can pose a problem. Due to the vast amount of different views and viewpoints that exist within an organisation, it will become increasingly difficult to do just that - communicate your architecture. Therefore, as part of the architecture strategy, a method and dictionary for understanding and communicating your architecture must be developed. This common dictionary and method of communication is fundamental to any architectural exercise. Such an exercise consists of 60% communication time, 10% preparation time, and 30% actual deliverable development time.
The best architects are therefore often linguists, able to communicate and understand complex tasks in a short verbal style. This is our mechanism to avoid a mass of views and viewpoints. One of the largest areas of failure within the architecture domain is this breakdown of communication. If everyone understood the sentence "I want to be customer-driven" then half the problem of architecture would fade away. Who exactly is the customer? What is meant by "driven vs centric"? Why "I" want and not "we" or "the company"?
The last statement is perhaps the most complex to deal with in architecture - politics. In my battle analogy, the architect operates in a role similar to that of a general. His task is to develop the plan to win the war, which is often to accomplish the miraculous. Using limited resources, often understaffed with underskilled soldiers and lieutenants, he not only has to save the day but deal with the internal wrangles of his own bureaucratic red tape. The makings of a true leader and politician.
Next month, I will show how an architect can become a knowledgeable linguist, a master politician and the expert general within the politically-charged battle scene that constitutes most businesses.
* SiloFX sponsors ITWeb`s enterprise architecture industry portal, which takes an in-depth look at this still often misunderstood discipline. Enterprise architecture provides the blueprint to ensure the best IT value contribution possible. It`s becoming increasingly important in a business environment characterised by mergers, acquisitions and consolidations, where the ability to quickly integrate business and IT plans is paramount.
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