Much the same at the TOGAF conferences. It’s shifted a bit over the past couple of years, from those ‘blank stares’, to a kind of guilty embarrassment – like they’re just about aware of the elephant in the room, but they’re still way too… something… to turn and face it as yet. Dunno why: p’raps because as vendors they need to sell IT-based ‘solutions’, whereas admitting to the elephant means that they know those ‘solutions’ don’t and can’t work?

Plenty of people here who know about – and are very good at – enterprise-wide IT-architecture; but in most cases it seems barely even the first clue about whole-of-enterprise architecture, about architecture for non-IT-centric enterprises, about process-tracking along the whole value-chain (rather than only the IT-specific bits of the process), and so on, and so on. Frustrating as hell…

Hey ho. But yeah, time to stand up be counted, I guess: this *must* change, and change Real Soon Now, too…

Snap. http://www.agileea.com/portal/index.php/blog.html It’s something that’s been on my mind since I arrived in the UK ten years ago. I’d been doing EA work at a Water Utility back in South Africa, and joined a Dot.com in London. I thought to myself, what a Wonderful opportunity to start an EA Model of the enterprise from scratch, and build it up as the organisation itself matures. Nobody knew what I was on about and nobody cared of understood what I was trying to tell them.

To be fair in 1999 the CEO and Chairman did give it two or three hours over two days or so in workshops, but because they could not agree on the definitive Vision and Mission of the company they decided to sweep the whole initiative under the carpet. I think they thought they were wasting time on this Airy-Fairy stuff, and not doing proper work and that was the end of that…

When I asked people from Rational software in 2000 why their Rose Tool and UML was not being enhanced to define notation types for Principles, Strategy, Vision and other Diagram types I was also met with complete blank stares. To this day that remains the same too…

Regarding the need to manouevre EA out of IT, CIO.com in the USA have just published my latest quarterly column “Tools for Leading Business Change”, which explores both the opportunity and the challenge.

http://www.cio.com/article/437569/Tools_for_Leading_Business_Change.

Also, my address to this years EA Conference in London was “Breaking EA Out of IT”. Previous ones have been “EA Driving Business Innovation” (which I also delivered in Sydney), and “Measuring the Contribution of EA”.

I feel it would be good to talk…

Chris Potts