A Serene View from the Ivory Tower

Greetings and Salutations Dear Reader,

Your reasons for coming this far are likely trifurcated to one of the following scenarios.
1. You have reached a cross roads in your intellectual defense of Enterprise Architecture and want to know if there is a better way. Congratulations. You have the opportunity to shepherd a new path. Help resurrect a darkened art.
2. You are a staunch defender of an outdated practice and want to lambast this site in an attempt to rebut its manifesto. Argue away. Do tell us when your funding runs out. We will send you a nice bundt cake with our condolences.
3. You are torn to the marrow over the fact that Electronic Arts or some other institution bearing the acronym EA has succumbed this earthly plane for the great beyond. You are in luck. You have simply joy clicked to the wrong adventure. Please enjoy your day.

Not an Enterprise Architecture Manifesto

As previously pointed out by the giant title screen, EA is Dead. Therefore the following manifesto is not for Enterprise Architecture. Give that one up. Grab a beverage and ponder your thoughts.

The Not Enterprise Architecture Manifesto

  1. Deliver Business Value. Sitting around sweating the small stuff when the business is asking you to help them devise a way to get thingy X to deliver heaping pile of cash Y, don’t stop them down in academic diatribes about the value of a reference architecture for interdimensional heterozygotic data interface eventers . . . blah blah blah . . . that will surely work because you read it in a book or worse saw it at a convention. Understand your business. Walk in their shoes. The little IT company inside your business that thinks it has its own ticker symbol is still just a business unit and one that needs to think about how the real ticker symbol makes money.
  2. Be decisive. Procrastination and over deliberation about perfection kills good enough every time.
  3. Have a plan that does things. Don’t sit around talking about doing a plan that will eventually turn into an exercise about getting something into a committee to vote on a focus group about delivering a presentation. You are an expert at what you do. You already made some decisions. Now show people how it turns into a reality.
  4. Fail Fast. If your grand future state takes ten years to realize then you are likely not being heard. Vision is a long game but trying to put a technology roadmap together ten years into the future is a losing proposition. Technology changes too fast.
  5. Become Data Driven. Use quantitative facts to drive discussions. Data is perhaps the most valuable resource on the planet and architects hide it like cave art in flowery powerpoint decks and pretty picture department drawings that no one can summon relevant information from at a moment’s notice. Weaponize your data to show the value of the decisions being made.
  6. Automate Everything. If you can talk about guidance and principles and reference this and that and can sit down and draw it and explain it to someone and then explain it the same way twice then by all means turn that thing into a repeatable pattern that someone can get their grubby paws on, check out and just use. No discussion required. People should be able to shop for their architecture outcomes.
  7. Rinse and Repeat. Architecture isn’t finite. As soon as you pat yourself on the back and think you are done, the landscape changes. Change is good. It keeps you employed. Grooming your landscape repetitively keeps the strategy fresh.

About

We, the humble progenitors of doings things came about after years of failed attempts at getting anybody to listen to anything that resembled an architecture body of knowledge, certification, practitioner, consulting group or any other pundit claiming to understand the enterprise architecture continuum.

Years of being beaten over the head with a rolled up newspaper, prodded by business leaders who proclaimed, give me my thingy nerd, left us with our conundrum. What value were we bringing the ticker symbol? Why did we exist? We were really smart. Like, go build rocket ships instead of getting beaten over the head with a newspaper smart, but we prodded along anyway with a notion that a framework and job title would make others listen to the soap box of complex human outpouring we gallantly powerpointed to over-perfection.

Now we write about getting things done. With a plan. That does things.

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