Zachman
Tonight the grandfather of Enterprise Architecture, John Zachman presented to the DAMA audience at the Australian Museum. Despite his standing as such an amazing professional, his presentation whilst old school (read OHP slides!) was hilarious!
It’s probably best to summarise what he said in point form:
- An analogy of a building architect reflected on the challenges of an Enterprise Architect. When determining how much detail to put into an architectural plan it depends how much the building owner actually knows what they want. If the owner knows exactly what they want then you can get away with a high level plan, if they haven’t a clue then you need to put in an ‘excruciating amount of detail’.
- Why does the enterprise need still need IT people when everything is cheaper to outsource – both the building and maintaining of IT systems. It’s proven that you can’t just outsource something and expect it to run effectively – you need to define how it works and apply appropriate governance to ensure it remains that way. And this is why we still need IT people within organisations.
- It takes a mechanical engineer 4 years of training to be able to adequately read plans, it takes 2 more for them to be able to draft plans of their own that meet the standards. However to understand whether that design is going to work or not you need to have the experience to know what will and won’t work. A comment about the amount of grey hair being proportional to your ability to be an EA – maybe it’s time to procure some grey hair dye….
- Overcomplicating design is so common but instead we should be looking at what is the bare minimum required to achieve the goals – saving time and money for the business.
The key takeouts for small business are that it’s essential to use high quality and experienced staff to help design what your enterprise landscape looks like, it’s probably the case that you can’t afford to have someone like this permanently employed so use a contractor. However it’s even more important to have someone within your organisation who can tell them what you need and where you are going so that the design is correct.
And for enterprises the takeout is exactly the same….
John also recommended reading this book –Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage
Check out some of the models in this book – Enterprise Architecture Using the Zachman Framework (MIS)
Tags: Architecture
