Beyond EA

Contributed by: Christian Weichelt

I still remember when I was young and played around with those rubik’s cubes (for those of you who are digital natives, here’s what this 3D touch app is about ). I was always happy if I managed to get at least one side of it right. Of course this usually screwed up the other sides, but the complexity of solving it all together was simply too much for me.

When I was listening to the analyst sessions at the Gartner EA Summit in London it came to me that enterprise architecture is kind of a rubik’s cube for organizations – it is where the viewpoints of business, finance, and IT meet. Gartner calls the business side of the cube with its strategy and vision the enterprise context. And just like in the rubik’s challenge you cannot solve one side alone or one after the other. Not doing it seems to be again a matter of complexity.

But enterprise architecture is the linchpin where these perspectives cross and as such has to deal with the complexity. And this is where tools come in to support organizations with this exercise – and this is where tools are very different. Listening to Gartner it sounded to me that over the last years it was almost all about representing the cube and showing you where you are or were. This has changed dramatically with the increasing dynamics and accelerating change: enterprises are now looking for tools and guidelines that help them solve the problems not just describing them – permanently and consistently. Therefore, it’s more about your next move, its impact and how the sides will look like when you’re done.

And one more thing showed at this year’s Gartner EA Summit: when talking about enterprise architecture one should focus on the business side of the cube and not on the IT side. But that’s what we knew before.