Friday, September 18, 2009

Australian Architecture Forum - Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture

In August, Tim Rubin and I ran a couple of the open space breakout sessions as Part of the Australian Architecture Forum in both Melbourne and Sydney. The first being around Pragmatic Enterprise Architect, the second regarding Cloud Computing. Not surprising the interest and the inter-relationship between the 2 topics gathered alot of interest and open discussion.

In Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture, I positioned a quote that I like from Gartner, where they suggest that
Just Enough models should be created Just In Time to address the specific (Business Driven Requirements) - Gartner 2005

exploring this further, a lot of time can be spent building artifacts that have little or no impact on business outcome and as such we need to think carefully about how much is built out. I suggested the following 6 steps
  1. Identify the Business Strategy and Objective
  2. Establish an EA program/requirement
  3. Define the "Future State" Architecture (Don't spend too much time dwelling and documenting the past)
  4. Define the EA Roadmap (Linked to business benefits)
  5. Establish EA Governance (ensuring measurement and attainment of business priorities)
The key to Enterprise Architecture is not the volume or the number of artifacts that you create, but the pragmatism and ability to action them!

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