Beyond EA

Contributed by: Markus Linsin

A few days ago, I was at a meeting with a customer in which about 10 Enterprise Architects got together to discuss some pending decisions with regards to the implementation of an Enterprise Architecture SW Platform.We discussed various topics around EA Road Mapping, how to model the structure of the Business Architecture, questions around interface modeling, etc.

When I left the room and was on my way home, I started to realize that basically all of the attendants had a very strong technical background.Terms like SOA, ESB, WSDL, Web Methods, OWSM were thrown around and they talked about MQ as if it was everybody’s favorite pub around the corner. They used to be technical program managers in the PMO office, were managing an in-house development team, had titles like “Principal Technology Architect” and “Lead Integration Architect”.They all had a good sense of the overall business and business model but none of them seemed to actually come from the Business itself.

Why is this?

Is the term “architect” much more aligned to someone with a technical background? Do we expect an architect to primarily define and design a technical environment vs. a business solution that is leveraging technology? Is maybe part of the “alignment” problem the fact that Enterprise Architects align IT to the Business primarily through the glasses of Technology instead of aligning a Solution that is technology based to a Business problem? Am I splitting hairs here?

I have been in many discussions between the Business and IT where the answer to a business problem almost by definition had to be a technology solution. Could the saying “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” be translated into “If all you know is technology, everything looks like an IT project”?

When you look at how Apple designed and developed the IPhone, they clearly didn’t start with technology in mind. Otherwise they would have developed maybe a thinner, smaller cooler looking phone with an ergonomically more beautiful keypad. Just a better phone. No, they looked at the problem from many different angles, but primarily they looked at it from the end user perspective. What do end users want to with a device besides using it just as a phone?

They redefined phone as an “audio and video enabled fun-generating communication device” and communication was much more than just calling people. It was messaging, emailing, blogging, twittering, surfing the internet, facebooking, etc. And they understood that we were all tired of carrying around a phone, an MP3 player, a camera and a laptop to send email. They first understood the problem really in detail (and granted, they also created demands that we didn’t even know existed deep in all of us and then they threw awesome technology at the problem. The key project team lead for the IPAD and IPhone was not a technology guy but a member of Apple’s design team. He admitted in an interview he doesn’t even know how a chip works!
So all I am saying is that the Enterprise Architecture Team would benefit tremendously of injecting some pure business people into their organization. Those business people would be able to understand the business requirements in detail and in some situations challenge the business on the validity of the requirement. Which could lead to much more stable requirements that maybe do not change half-way into the project or could lead to projects that actually never happen.

And now I go and put on my helmet because I am sure I just positioned myself in the center of the EA bulls eye!