My friend Nick Malik wrote a post - Zachman’s Fatal Flaw: No Row for Customer.  Here is my response …

Do I believe that Zachman’s Framework is fatally flawed?  No. It all depends on your perspective and that to me is defined by your EA maturity.  How we view and evaluate models and frameworks depends on how much time we have spent working on Enterprise Architecture.

Here is a simplistic example of what I mean. Think of our understanding of astronomy that we have at various stages of our education.  As an elementary school student, we learned about the solar system and the main celestial bodies.  As we progressed to secondary school, we learned about gravity and its influence on the solar system.  At a university level, even more depth and understanding of the physics adds to our understanding (and perspective) of the universe.  Would a graduate student use the grade school model to understand the solar system? No, but does that invalidate the elementary model used to introduce astronomy to grade schoolers? No it does not.

What Nick observes is that our view of  the Zachman Framework has changed, due to the growth in our EA maturity.  Most organizations that embarked on establishing Enterprise Architecture practices focused internally first.  We did this to understand what we had and what it cost to deliver the technology services required by our companies.  EA also started primarily in the IT departments and slowly began to grow outwards to assist in business and strategic planning. If we start with an internal view focused on IT what would you expect? An internal focus – think of it as getting our house in order.  This is a very “Inside-Out” perspective and the Zachman Framework served may organizations well over the past decade. That is why so much EA writing uses the “IT” and its relationship to “the Business”  model. Here is Nick’s quote about the flaw:

What is the fatal flaw?  As you can tell from the title of the post, the flaw is an “Inside-Out” perspective on the enterprise.

We are maturing our EA profession from being focused on our internal processes and complexity and moving to a customer centric focus. Now that we have a better handle on our internal house using an EA approach, the next logical place for EA to focus and show value is in strategic planning.  Nick’s quote about the customer is particularly important here:  Read more...

Gene Leganza, Forrester VP Research wrote a post today titled “Babies, Bath Water, and Enterprise Architecture Maturity Models”. He gave an overview of why he discounted capability maturity models in the past as a technique for maturing EA.  In the post, Gene wrote positively about the roadmap approach we use to plan, mature and assess our EA practice – our EA roadmap.  I will keenly follow any comments and feedback from Gene’s blog post.  

Here are the links to my earlier posts on our EA CMM approach that Gene referenced:

• Feb 2008 – How I a CMM to plan, mature and assess our EA practice
• Feb 2009 – EA CMM Revisited and Renewed

Gene, thank you for commenting on our roadmap approach. I will be looking into the “Goal-Question-Metric” technique you mentioned to further refine our approach (and I will blog on it when I am ready!).

If any of you want the templates, just email me at ldesousa12 AT gmail.com and I will be happy to send them to you.

I wrote about how we use an Enterprise Architecture Capability Maturity Model as a roadmap and measure of the success of our EA practice. This post has been the most responded to on my blog.  I have sent the Excel template to colleagues around the globe to over 15 different people.

Just a quick refresher on the process I use for our EA CMM development:

1. Identify 5 stages of maturity (processes: Level 1=Informal, Level 2=Development, Level 3=Defined, Level 4=Managed, Level 5=Optimized)
2. List Attributes that describe the maturity level
3. Develop Attribute Descriptions for further clarification
4. Review with stakeholders particularly management and peers
5. Create a spreadsheet to record the CMM
6. Evaluate and score each Attribute (I used a simple scale of 0=not started, 0.5=underway, 1=complete)
7. Total scores for each level to determine CMM level and total EA Maturity score
8. Publish and review regularly (annually might be the best option)

So what were the big changes in our EA CMM from the last iteration?  Unfortunately, not as much as I hoped. Managing a team of 24 systems analysts is more than a full time job.

There were some tangible improvements ….  Read more...

• EA Assessments of Capital purchase requisitions involving technology – A benefit of moving EA responsibility into a management role allows me to interact with key decision makers around the Institute and provide the guidance and consulting required on projects.  I actively work on a communication strategy that involves  emails, presentations, face to face meetings, etc to ensure our community knows the EA service is here to help.  A big win in the past year has been a partnership with our Finance department on reviewing capital requests for technology.  I now receive a request to provide an EA assessment of a technology purchase requisition before it gets approved. 
• Creation of a Solutions Architecture practise – We posted and hired a Solutions Architect last year. The main mission of the Solutions Architect was to work on managing complexity in our solution delivery platforms. The solution architect manages and maintains our application portfolio. This has allowed us to get a handle on the many solution delivery stacks.  We understand the complexity of our current state and have articulated a future state architecture with only 3 solution stacks.