It seemed patently obvious to me from the first day I started on EA that its task could be characterised by two simples verbs, ‘know’ and ‘design’.

Design is another conversation – and I think the now stabilising distinction between solutions and enterprise architecture is helpful there.

There is no doubt in my mind that EA is a knowledge-discipline first and foremost. And I have always been clear that knowledge is something that exists only in people’s minds, and is not easily subject to the process-automation techniques we use on structured information.

Your reflections are apposite to current practices and insightful. I particularly like the idea of ‘autism’ as a metaphor for what happens when we confuse knowledge with the information that supports its discovery, use and creation.

All human culture, including business culture, is a means to the preservation and sharing of knowledge. Admittedly in unmanaged cultural systems the signal to noise ration can be pretty crappy. But we seem to easily forget that the default state of natural (small) social systems provides very low resistance to the spread of knowledge.

Large, complex and arbitrarily structured social systems place a lot barriers to the easy dissemination of knowledge – often as a means of eliminating ‘noise’.

Process – our idea which is rooted in the division-of-labour assembly-line factories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – has been a powerful answer to the chaos of natural social systems. It has been used to overcome various distances – in authority, location, and even personal knowledge – that complexity has created between individuals inside organisations. A corollary of overcoming that distance however is the ‘friction’ it creates to inhibit the natural spread of knowledge.

It will most definitely not be me that leads the way on this, but I am watching with interest how knowledge-based approaches to management and value creation evolve in large organisations as social computing develops.

For the first time we are seeing technology that supports the natural exchange of knowledge in a social system. As a result new possibilities for overcoming distance in large complex organisations are presenting themselves.

I hope forward thinking EA’s who read you article will consider collaboration to be an imperative in their practice, and knowledge a much more concrete and viable goal than ‘alignment’. And I hope it encourages EAs to think creatively about new modes of practice.

I laugh reading about ‘abilities to influence’, ‘matrix management’ and the like. These all imply ridiculous timeframes, the need to cleverly make things happen without involving the right people and pushing things through.

With correct behaviors from the top, trust flows, misbehaviors can be dealt with opening and things can move at rates beyond peoples expectation.

Keep up the good work..

Also brings it back to Dave Snowden’s point that sharing of knowledge can never be coerced, but is in effect a gift from the individual to the shared-enterprise – something that organisations (and everyone, actually) need to respect. It may well be that “business leaders require collaboration”, but unless they provide safe conditions under which that collaboration can occur, it ain’t gonna happen! Supporting “their people on that learning curve” is key here, as you say.

Thanks again, anyway.

The big risk to the success of enterprise architecture in business now is fear. As you point out – KM and EA concepts are similar but people / business managers / staff sees a loss of power and control coming from real enterprise architecture when in fact, as a common language – it is just a connector enabling communications between real knowledge and people in support of action. i.e. we need our stakeholders to understand that their Tacit knowledge needs to stay with them while their Explicit knowledge needs to be shared to enable relationships and wider understanding with holders of Tacit knowledge so that decisions can be made and corresponding action be taken.
Human nature resists this and people fear the implications of the implied collaboration. I believe that enterprise architecture inclusive of proactive decision making can only be effective when business leaders require collaboration and support their people on that learning curve.