Comments for Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

Comment on How I use a CMM to plan, mature and assess our EA practice by Louw Fouche

Louw Fouche — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:47:31 +0000

Thanks for this post and valuable EA profession work done with the creation of this CMMi for EA. I believe it will add great value to the credibility of EA in the professional world.

Comment on EA Communication Plan Development by Leo de Sousa

Leo de Sousa — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 04:16:39 +0000

Penny, I will email you the template tomorrow. Cheers! Leo

Comment on EA Communication Plan Development by Penny

Penny — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:59:32 +0000

I would also like an excel format of the template. Thank you in advance.

Comment on Lecturing on EA @ BCIT – Rethinking my Approach by Leo de Sousa

Leo de Sousa — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:25:09 +0000

Allan,

Thank you for the excellent insights and feedback. We do have a long way to go to get to the rigour that is demonstrated by Finance practices. Have you looked at what the Center for the Advancement of the Enterprise Architecture Practice (CAEAP) is up to. I have been working on a couple of chapters in the Professional Practice Guide. Here is the website http://caeap.org

My presentation is too big to email but I can create a pdf to share with you.

Cheers! Leo

Comment on Lecturing on EA @ BCIT – Rethinking my Approach by Allan Gillard

Allan Gillard — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:13:56 +0000

Hi Leo,
My view on this as an architect for over 15 years, and a developer before that, is that I would agree that much of Enterprise Architecture (EA) has a technical focus. I see that as a consequence of the increasing reliance on technology to enable the business to deliver its goods and services to its customers.
Where EA is applied in an organisation tends to be centred around Projects – which makes sense since they are the change mechanism for taking an organisation from where they are today (the Current State), to where they want to be (the Target State). EA is about defining that Target State (across the Business, Information, Application and Technology domains) as determined by the Business Drivers and stated in the Business Strategy, and outlining the roadmap on how best to get there. The Business Strategy identifies the Business Objectives that are then assigned to Projects to deliver (the Demand Pipeline).
Solution Architecture (SA) takes the roadmaps and applies them to the project objectives and constraints (Budget, Cost and Resources – the Supply Pipeline), and designs the solution in line with the specific project requirements.
The solution is then developed and implemented by the project within the current operational and system management environment.
The point is that EA is still an evolving practice when compared to the equivalent disicplines of Finance and HR – Finance has its roots going back to the 18th century, and HR practices dated from the late 19th century, while EA only really began in the 1960s.
I would be interested if possible to get a copy of the notes from your presentation.
Regards,
Allan.

Comment on Enterprise Architects – What attributes do you look for? by Leo de Sousa

Leo de Sousa — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:08:21 +0000

Bas, Thank you for the comments and insights. The term “Strategic Practitioner” does not replace Enterprise Architect or Strategic Planner. We created a “strategic” team that had senior staff from EA, PM, IT Security, IT Strategy, BCP/DR and called it “Strategic Practices”. All the best, Leo

Comment on Enterprise Architects – What attributes do you look for? by Bas van Gils

Bas van Gils — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 07:12:46 +0000

Hi,

I really like the analysis in terms of skills vs talents, specialist vs generalist. These are things we struggle with on a daily basis in both consulting and teaching. As you already pointed out, skills can be learned. One can learn how to do decomposition for a new IT-system, how to do functional analysis to design a new business process, or how to implement a six-sigma approach in an enterprise.

Learning these skills takes time, which is why it is to be expected that there are few young (under thirty) good enterprise architects. Especially since they also need the proper mindset and talents.

I’m not so sure about the term ’strategic practitioner’ though. I think the EA community will like it, but the strategic management community wont as they (correctly!) feel the term ’strategy’ is applied to too many things already.

Comment on Enterprise Architects – What attributes do you look for? by LeodeSousa

LeodeSousa — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 04:36:12 +0000

Brenda Michelson (@bmichelson) tweeted about my post above and provided a link to one of her blog posts that is outstanding and provides a very thorough coverage of what an enterprise architect should be .

IT Linchpin 2006: The (Business-Driven) Enterprise Architect – http://blog.elementallinks.net/2006/01/it_linchpin_200.html.

Thanks for sharing this with me Brenda.

Comment on Enterprise Architects – What attributes do you look for? by LeodeSousa

LeodeSousa — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 01:11:03 +0000

Tom, thank you for the great feedback. I like your suggestion of ’synthesis’. Just to clarify, the deep and broad part relates to the person having deep skills in a domain of EA with the ability to go broad in the other domain areas of EA. I started out with depth in data and information architecture and then broadened my experience in the other domains. I will take a look at your posts and comment further.

Cheers! Leo

Comment on Enterprise Architects – What attributes do you look for? by Tom Graves

Tom Graves — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:41:54 +0000

I like the term ‘Strategic Practitioner’ a lot, and I do think you’re going the right way overall.

There are a few key differences between strategy and architecture (especially enterprise-architecture), as I’ve written recently on my own blog – see http://weblog.tomgraves.org/index.php/2010/01/28/ea-and-strategy/ and http://weblog.tomgraves.org/index.php/2010/02/02/vision-strategy-plans-and-tactics/ – might be useful to be sure which of the two you’re aiming for here.

I know your skill-set list is only examples, but I would advocate including ’synthesis’, as a necessary counterbalance to analysis/logic – otherwise you end almost automatically back in the specialist-only camp.

The only real worry I have is that I fear you’re being unrealistic in asking for deep _and_ broad. The problem is simply one of _time_. Keeping up to date in just one specialism is hard enough these days; but being expected to keep up to date in many different and often diametrically-opposed skills will be way too much to ask in real-world practice. More realistic might be that the practitioner has _had_ depth-experience in several different key fields, rather than is necessarily fully current in all of them. I would recommend an attitude of ‘current-_enough_’ – not necessarily current in depth, even in anything, but _does_ know enough to know what the current themes and trends are, and how to hold meaningful conversations with specialists who _are_ fully current in each field.