Agree entirely.

The practical problem is that the Open Group holds the ‘enterprise architecture’ space at the moment, and despite the shift in mindset described in my post, clearly wants their part of it to remain centred on IT, because that’s always been their main focus. Which is fair enough, but it does mean that there’s a kind of vacuum – hence, as you say, the real danger of proliferating ‘”we’ll do it better” sects’, each purporting o be ‘the new standard’.

Some of this fragmentation is natural and even necessary – see, for example, the context-specific variants of Linux for enhanced-security or use in embedded systems. But yes, we do need a common ground where all the extended-EA variants do at least share a common foundation. No idea where that will be, but I’m suspecting that the Open Group route has all but run its course.

Do also agree that EA will usually include some aspects of IT: the scope of enterprise architecture covers the entire enterprise, and IT is definitely (usually!) part of the enterprise in some form or other (if only as pencil and paper ). I’m not saying that IT isn’t part of EA, just that’s it’s not necessarily the centre of EA. (To be precise, everywhere and nowhere is ‘the centre’ of EA – the centre is whatever needs to be the focus of our attention in this moment, here, now.)

There are a lot of us ‘doing our own thing’, just as there were/are with the Open Source movement: any ideas as to what could be our EA equivalent for SourceForge, perhaps?

Good article. As you know, because we have talked about it at length, that I agree with you on much of this. In fact it is the reason why I went off in 2006 and started work on the http://process.AgileEA.com.

We are however at risk as an EA industry of spawning too many small break-away “we’ll do it better” sects. We need to all get together and form a central place, with a few common principles and objectives to work towards and release something that is better overall.

I also think we should be careful of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Even if EA is currently too IT centric, and we get it more Business centric, there will always be elements of IT within EA and we need to not lose sight of these elements.

Charles

I agree with the fact that TOGAF doesn’t do much about business architecture.
As a practitian and consultant I felt the fact that the current EA frameworks fail to convey a picture of how the business works. In fact the outcome EA has a very small audience because the islands of IT described cannot convey an overall picture of the structure and operation of any Enterprise.
That being said, I published a book where all layers of an Enterprise Architecture are treated. I provide business reference maps (starting from Value Chains), process maps, alignment to the Enterprise business and operating model, IT applications and technology architecture templates. It’s not that I want to promote the book. But I feel the Business Architecture model and the overall framework work and would help push the EA forward.
The 3rd edition of the book is available on Amazon and other sites.
http://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Architecture-Development-Framework-Practices/dp/1412086655/

Adrian