Our toolsets play an important role in those conversations. The right tool used in the right way can really help the conversation, help create new shared understandings across the silos and the specifics of each distinct discipline.

But the wrong tool – or even the right tool used in the wrong way – may instead act as a real barrier against awareness and understanding. Getting the balance right is critical to creating the clarity we need – yet the requirements, and the balance, are different for every type of architecture-conversation.

We’ve long had a good range of frameworks and toolsets for IT-oriented architectures. Some were aimed more at systems-development; others more at taxonomy and ontology and metamodel-development; others again at modelling dependencies across IT systems and ‘business/IT-alignment’; and yet others at requirements-traceability, governance and project-management. Yet they all had one thing in common: their whole focus was about precision, about certainty – because that’s what system design and development really needs.

But as enterprise-architecture at last begins to break out of the IT-centric box that it’s been trapped in for the past couple of decades, we start to hit up against some real limitations of those toolsets:

• most of the underlying metamodels and model-types are still very IT-centric
• user-interfaces are usually complicated, abstract, often intolerant of error, and in some cases even downright ‘user-hostile’
• most of the tools – especially at the high-end – are too expensive for general use
• diagramming is usually abstract (‘boxes and lines’) rather than ‘real-world’ (trucks, people, machines, servers, cables etc)
• support for versioning and for tentative ‘what-if’ experiments ranges from poor to non-existent
• none of the user-interfaces are well-suited for use in real-time exploratory conversations

There’s also still no common exchange-language to transfer architecture-information between the tools that we already have – and even when we get one, we’ll need it to go wider than that, anyway. A lot wider.

When we look at how we actually work with executives or process-designers or security-architects or the like, the tools we most often use at present are a whiteboard or a sketchbook – nothing else has the flexibility that we need. None of the existing tools allow us to play ‘what-if?’ as well as we can on a whiteboard; and the precise formal rigour of model-validation is far more of a hindrance than a help in this kind of work, where half the time we don’t even know what kinds of architectural-entities are involved – the whole point is that that’s what we’re aiming to find out!

But we still need some kind of toolset-help here: images on whiteboards and sketchbooks aren’t easy to share – I’ve often seen people simply photograph the results and pass the image-files around as ‘the model’ – whilst office tools such as Visio and Powerpoint give a spurious illusion that the results have been captured with enough rigour to be re-usable (which they’re not), and are usually too slow and cumbersome for an across-the-table discussion anyway.

So here’s our challenge: develop a toolset for the ‘conversations’ end of the enterprise-architecture spectrum – one that will work on laptops and netbooks, on the new tablet and touchpad systems, and preferably right down to smartphones as well.

It needs to be able to cover any aspect of enterprise-architecture – from business-models to skills to security to process to disaster-recovery to operations to knowledge-management to applications to service-management to IT-infrastructure to building-infrastructure and anything in between.

It needs to be able to adapt itself to the needs and worldviews and language of each of those groups of stakeholders – and provide some means of translation between each group, too.

It needs to be fast, easy to use, engaging, enjoyable, preferably tactile too – yet have a fully-structured methodology and metamodel behind it.

It needs to allow freeform development of models and diagrams – yet still be capable of linking to the formal rigour of the ‘top end’ systems.

Coming the other way, it needs to help us explain the structures and reference-models that we already have in our ‘top-end’ systems – and explain the reasoning behind those models, too – whilst still keeping people actively engaged in the conversation.

And more and more, architects are beginning to recognise that spurious certainty is a real risk for the enterprise – so this also toolset needs to help our stakeholders become more comfortable with uncertainty and change.

Working with a loose consortium of colleagues – including Adrian Campbell, Kevin Smith, Milan Guenther, Nigel Green and others – we’ve done a fair bit of work on this already:

• preliminary metamodels and file-structures
• probable user-interface workflows on tablet (mouse/stylus) and touchpad (finger) interfaces
• probable user-experience interactions in multi-stakeholder conversations
• some suggested methodologies
• some key features, such as AudioNote-style synchronised voice-recording and Prezi-style zooming ‘infinite’ workspace
• support for a broad user-extensible range of model-types – potentially-unlimited, including user-defined types
• support for indefinite nesting/layering of models and model-types
• support for freeform-drawing, notes, embedding of user-selected icons and images
• support for reports that enable us to describe some or all of the enterprise as a story

There’s a lot more to do to get this even to an alpha-release state in any format or platform; and whilst all of us, in the group so far, have ‘done our time’ in software-development and the like, none of us is sufficiently available (or, in my case at least, really up to the speed or quality needed) for professional-level app-development on current systems. So we’re going to need help to make this happen.

I for one would prefer to see this as an Open Source or at least freeware/shareware type of development, so as to get this out into as general a usage as possible. (As I see it, this kind of toolset should have many other applications outside of enterprise-architecture, such as in strategy-development, tactical planning etc.) But if some commercial developer wants to take it on, that would be fine too, as long as we can keep the final end-user cost down to app-levels (perhaps $10-30 at most) rather than the three-, four-, five- or even six-digit sums we sometimes see for other toolsets.

So: over to you. Any offers of help or advice? Any other comments or suggestions?

There’s also a lot of it – at least a couple of hundred tweets – so it’s best to put in a ‘Read more…’ link at this point:

For simplicity, I’ve left out my own name on tweets that I posted (which seem to have been the majority for this conference – a slight disappointment, because it meant that there wasn’t that much of a backchannel). All posts other than my own are preceded with the respective person’s Twitter-ID in italics.

I’ve sorted the posts into the correct chronological order, and under headings for the respective conference-presentations. The ‘Other sessions’ headings relate to presentations that I didn’t manage to get to.

Intro/miscellaneous

• stevenunn The Open Group Rome conference #ogrome kicks off to a full house, despite recent volcanic activity. Well done to everyone for getting here.
• jdevoo: Follow The Open Group Conference Rome 2010 under #ogrome
• a_josey New free EA WP from The Open Group released: World-Class Enterprise Architecture (reg’n requ’d) http://bit.ly/ahjc56 #ogrome
• a_josey 2nd free WP from The Open Group: World-Class EA: Framework Guidance & TOGAF 9 Example (regn req’d) http://bit.ly/cLRozq #ogrome
• a_josey TOGAF 9 Template Artifacts and Deliverables, Set 2 now available from The Open Group, http://bit.ly/9TGMQp #ogrome
• a_josey The Open Group TOGAF White Papers repository has been updated today. Includes two new papers on EA adoption. http://bit.ly/PD5c6
• a_josey Second White Paper on adoption of world-class EA published at provides guidance on how to implement TOGAF 9 http://bit.ly/cLRozq …
• chrisdpotts: Will TOGAF be extended to include all the technologies a business uses, not just IT?

Terry Blevins (MITRE Corp): Air Force Architecting Concept of Operations – using architecture to support decision making

• stevenunn Terry Blevins, of Mitre Corp, stresses the importance of having architects communicate with business at #ogrome.
• Technodad Terry Blevins covers US Air Force Concept of Operation for architecture at #ogrome. About supporting decision making for mission/business.
• stevenunn Terry Blevins tells #ogrome how the US Air Force uses architecture to support decision-making.
• industryleaders Attending Air Force Architecting Concept Operations. EA Capabilities in action now live!!
• stevenunn Critical capabilities for US Aur Force include effective decision-support, functioning governance, and optimal build capability.
• Terry Blevins: USAF: architecture starts from values (not from IT or jargon!)
• Terry Blevins USAF: no solution sits by itself – the really important part is the connections between architectures
• Terry Blevins: architecture supports synthesis – and no, it’s not as simple as pushing a button! – governance is the key
• Terry Blevins: the test of architecture-quality is whether it’s *usable* in practice – not just whether it’s in a standard form
• theopengroup Terry Blevins concludes his presentation at #ogrome by urging the sharing of best practices in architecture through The Open Group.
• Technodad Allen Brown and Terry Blevins discuss the role of the architect in supporting the warfighter. http://post.ly/dETe
• Terry Blevins: anything you prescribe top-down for an architecture (e.g. segments) is likely to be wrong… must be emergent
• trouxsoftware Great key to EA success. Blevins: “clear scope and purpose”

Leonardo Ramirez: EA Evolution from IT to Executive Board Conversation

• Ramirez “Technology starts with really good business thinking” (i.e. not technology-first!) #entarch #soa
• Ramirez: “SOA should not be a solution looking for an answer” #entarch #soa
• Ramirez: “EA should properly be used to mean the architecture of an entire enterprise, not just its IT assets” #entarch
• Ramirez: ‘IT’ projects are actually managed by business (as ‘owner’) rather than by IT
• Ramirez: Obtain trust (via emotive speech): Think about what you want the technology to do for each audience and then validate it.
• Ramirez: Audience did not care about (e.g.) use of process of agile development, as much as the result it could bring.
• Ramirez: EA acts as mediator / translator between many different business groups (including IT)
• Ramirez: EA provides end-to-end view, which includes IT metrics, business metrics, all people in the organisation
• Ramirez: top-level business-results – from 1 country to 5, 1 business-unit to 8, roll-outs drive consistency across whole org
• industryleaders Download the latest pdf presentation for EA evolution from IT to Execuitve board conversation from http://tinyurl.com/33lsxqf
• industryleaders A pic from the Plenary made this morning http://leonardoramirez-zfwhc.posterous.com/

Jack Fujieda (RegIS Inc/Open Group Japan): 10 Commandments of Enterprise Architecture – For Whom the Bell Tolls? Value of EA to the CxO

• Technodad Jack Fujieda presents Architecture 10 Commandments at. http://post.ly/dFcz
• Fujieda: engineering happens *after* we understand the what and why of the context
• mgl795: Some pictures of Fufieda-san’s session http://bit.ly/90u0cE

Chris Forde (Open Group): Enterprise Architecture – Getting Buy-in From the Business Line

• Forde: if they don’t get it, they don’t get it – and if the decision is theirs, not yours, don’t annoy them by repeating yourself!
• Forde: is what you’re doing sustainable? e.g. what happens when someone moves on? what happens when the org changes?
• Forde: I try to leave the IT slant out of this: we talk about scale in terms of (different) people), not (identical) servers
• Forde: who’s actually using what you do? no, who *really* uses it? if it’s not being used *now*, don’t spend big effort creating it
• Forde: typical business view of time-to-success is 3-6 months (not classic-EA 2-3 years, but also not less)
• Forde: remember that as an EA you *are* bringing to the (business) table a valuable body of knowledge – *you* need to value it too
• Forde: everything you do in an IT context should always be traceable to a real, identifiable business outcome – no ivory tower!
• Forde: every department in business is dysfunctional in some way – IT is no different (but probably no worse) than others in that..
• Forde: there’s a lot of info in the TOGAF spec about soft-skills if you look around in there without IT-specific assumptions

Len Fehskens / Tom Graves / Walter Stahlecker: ‘Extending EA to the Enterprise’ joint session

• Len Fehskens: (asking if we’ve read certain EA classics) “you’re all woefully ignorant, historically – not that that matters”
• presentation ‘Architecture on purpose’ for TOGAF Rome #entarch went well, will clean-up and post on Slideshare tomorrow
• ‘Enterprise-architecture on purpose’ – my slides from TOGAF Rome are now up on Slideshare http://bit.ly/9A0Uvd #entarch #bizarch
• Stahlecker: “enterprise architeture is the union of all architectures in an enterprise”
• Stahlecker: “EA has no a priori architectural hierarchy, alignments are what create and maintain an architectural hierarchy”
• Stahlecker: for TOGAF: “needed: alignment among concerns via ‘boundaryless architecture-information flow’”
• Stahlecker: business-architecture is the ‘chemistry’ – how the intended value, defined by stakeholders, are derived from the assets

Other sessions

• trouxsoftware Lambert: Capability planning is about business outcomes.
• harmenberg meeting on TOGAF tool certification at
• harmenberg useful meeting on TOGAF tool certification at; interesting point: should it be primarily specification based or use case based?

Richard Sawhney (Forrester): ‘Evolving Traditional [IT] Architecture to Business-Centric Architecture’

• sebastian_zeeb Richard Sawhney (Forrester) talks about next gerenration EA @ Opengroup Conferenc in Rome
• Sawhney: emphasis on convrsations, agility, value-driven (inc. non-monetary), arch. as coaching, metrics on metrics not compliance
• Sawhney: “it’s great that we’ve got this new thing called business-architecture” – this is new???
• harmenberg @tetradian if you live in the IT-world, business might seem new to you
• Sahwney: barely a third of orgs have implemented any real level of business-architecture (only 2% ‘nearly all we need’) #bizarch
• Sawhney: “‘business capability map’ model of capabilities with IT associated with them” – where do we capture non-IT?!?
• Sawhney: billed as moving beyond IT-centrism, but ‘business-architecture’ is same old ‘everything not-IT that might impact on IT’..?
• Sawhney: capabilities provide a ‘Rosetta stone’ for business-IT communication – is best level of granularity
• Sawhney: (‘business capability map’ is similar to what others would describe as a Functional Business Model – i.e tiered services)
• sebastian_zeeb According to Forrester Capability maps are a good way to align business needs to existing IT capabiliies #eacom
• trouxsoftware Richard Sawhney of Forrester: EA 2.0 is about business outcomes.
• Sawhney: (interesting to see this viewed as ‘new’ – all of this we we did in live practice at AusPost 6+ years ago…)
• industryleaders Great presentation from forrester at Open Group Rome Conference : Create and Validate Business View First
• Sawhney: “architecture is more about listening than talking” – agree (though I admit I’m not good enough at it yet… )
• Sawhney: ‘business skills’ are essential – being able to talk in the language of business – communication skills – avoid jargon
• Sawhney: (IT-)EA needs to develop collaboration-guidelines to assist business to make best/wisest use of cloud
• thobitz Another analyst who thinks that processes are just about fine-granular process steps, and therefore we need – “capabilities”
• Sawhney / Allen: EA needs to be presented as a business-level strategic capability, not an IT-capability
• thobitz Apparently he is also not sure whether it should be “capability” or “function” – uses the terms interchangably in the discussion
• sailesh_panchal Richard Sawhney of Forrester: EA 2.0 is about business outcomes. /via @trouxsoftware Well duh!

Erik Proper (CapGemini Academy): Architectures for Service Innovation

• Erik Proper: Architectures for Service Innovation – calling for case-studies in this area
• Proper: from product to service; monolithic orgs to networked enterprise; new business initiatives times down from months to days
• Proper: value web – not a simple value chain, is difficult now to determine direction; value-transforms often indirect/non-linear
• Proper: business-services / business-service innovation not yet gain much attention, yet business drives needs for software services
• Proper: architecture as a means to steer innovation (for business and/or IT etc) – service innovation is/cause enterprise-transforms
• Proper: #entarch provides a more concrete description of what strategy needs for implementation (hence EA as governance)
• Proper: (some nice crosslinks between EA-as-governance, de Leeuw on governance, and Stafford Beer on viable-systems)
• Proper: service innovation is about the whole enterprise, not just IT
• (re Proper) RT @SAlhir: RT @GrahamHill: RT @adfig: Last issue of ‘Service Science’ just out. http://bit.ly/cGIJv0 #servicedesign
• gollwitzera Erik provided interesting cross link to research activity – see http://service-science.info/
• Proper: recommends S2IP (sustainable services), TOGAF ADM (but *not* fixed IT-centric scope), VPEC-T (see @taotwit, @5Di), TRIZ
• Proper: use design-science (create something, trial it, evaluate, iterate) as a way to enhance TOGAF in live practice
• Proper: looking for #entarch case-studies for research @erikproper
• Proper: difference b/w ‘service’ and ‘capability’: capability implies ability to *execute* a service
• jdevoo @erikproper @tetradian What is the role of business schools in educating on EA? E.g. http://bit.ly/aVV2pg

Mike Rollings (Burton Group): Changing the Conversation – Becoming Business Relevant by Redefining Your Focus

• Rollings: quotes Gary Hamel and Shoshana Zuboff on drivers for overall rethink of management – making EA relevant in that shift
• Rollings: Hamel: “removing the pathology of the management hierarchy” – becoming social-systems architects, human-centric
• Rollings: Zuboff “There is no detailed map of the territory ahead – you are the mapmaker” – design-thinking, again human-centric
• harmenberg Mike Rollings at: it’s good to see someone with presentation capabilities…
• Rollings: th term ‘enterprise architecture’ does’t describe complexity behind it – we need to describe in business language not EA’s
• Rollings: ‘enterprise architects’ are not the only ones doing EA-type work – our role is not to teach EA but help others *apply* it
• CH_FEDARCH Burton Group Speaker says, architects need to change not only their language but their behavior to be more relevant to their org
• Rollings: EA’s application should increase the awareness of dependencies, implications and constraints for decision-making
• Rollings: most people do not care what ‘EA’ is, what they care about is the value gained from applying it
• erikproper @tetradian Meanwhile, EA is still positioned subordinate to the CIO …
• Rollings: integration not about EA (for its own sake) it’s about how well we connect with the other disciplines – watch for friction
• Rollings: what are others’ roadblocks / blindspots to making better decisions – EA should illuminate range of perspectives context
• Rollings: relevance: “examine everything from the context of another individual” – what is the problem that they’re experiencing?
• Rollings: collaboration “develop a shared context from a fabric of ideas” – start from the intended outcomes, dynamic, opportunity
• Rollings: “change the focus from the institution to the individual” – orgs are made up of unique people with unique views/needs
• Rollings: change EA behaviour: individual > initiate, collaboration > engage, relevance > empathize, perspective > visualise
• overall, a very useful / expressive / *relevant* presentation from Mike Rollings – recommended
• Rollings: need to make the elements of EA more approachable, change the discussion to serve and to become more business-relevant
• Rollings: a coming split between IT people who are running things vs those who focus on helping business improve/extend capabilities
• Rollings: “the point is that ya gotta learn the business!” – strongly agree
• mikerollings RT @tetradian: Rollings: “the point is that ya gotta learn the business!” – strongly agree #burtongroup #gartnerea
• trouxsoftware Rollins: BPM teams separate from EA. Do not think that they are doing EA. Similar to how many others pursue SOA. #entarch
• process2go RT @tetradian Rollings: most people don’t care what ‘EA’ is, they care about the value gained from applying it similar for #BPM
• harmenberg Mike Rollings at: ‘language and communication are at the heart of many problems.’ A case for ArchiMate I would say!
• bergmart @harmenberg I disagree with you. ArchiMate is for enterprise IT architecture not for enterprise business architecture.
• harmenberg @bergmart yes, we do disagree. There is more in BA than in ArchiMate, but ArchiMate is more than enterprise IT architecture
• erikproper @harmenberg Indeed. ArchiMate is more than EntWide IT architecture, but we are missing relevant aspects. Let’s clarify what we mis!
• marcostong17 Proper: mentioned 3 levels of capabilities for service innovation. And service innovation is or cause enterprise transformation.#ogrome

Len Fehskens (Open Group): Business Architecture – Just Another IT-Centric Idea?

• Len Fehskens session: Is ‘business-architecture’ just another IT-centric idea?
• ARSzakal The practice of Business Architecture is a discipline of EA. Architects who practice BA, EA and EITA apply all of these disciplines.
• ARSzakal Ok so we don’t really have a defacto industry agreement on what it means to be a business architect.
• ARSzakal Show me someone who suggests they only practice EA and not EITA or BA and not EA and I’ll introduce you to the unemployed.
• ARSzakal You almost never see a real productive archtiect only focus on one architectural discipline.
• omkhar RT @ARSzakal: Would you create a business architecture and never create the supporting IT architecture? I think not. // agreed
• Fehskens: IT centric defn of ‘business-architecture’ is probly OK is we’re honest about it, though it’s only useful to the IT domain
• Fehskens: it would be helpful to remember to stop partitioning the world into ‘the IT’ vs ‘the business’
• mikerollings Len Fehskens the separation of IT and the Business causes bias and is an outdated idea – I couldn’t agree more
• industryleaders The main conclusion is that EA must be business relevant
• Fehskens: ‘the business’ really deserves a more thoughtful characterisation than ‘whatever isn’t IT’
• Fehskens: the ‘siren song’ of “if the business had an architecture it would be easier for the IT architecture to align with it”…
• sebastian_zeeb Business meets Architecture – Mind the Gap. The Lever for Integration of Processes and IT. http://bit.ly/abc90a #eacom
• Fehskens: IT-centric version of ‘business architecture’ hijacks the term for another needed concept of ‘architecture of business’
• Fehskens: “IT is a function; ‘the business’ is not” – very important distinction
• ARSzakal Would you create a business architecture and never create the supporting IT architecture? I think not.
• Fehskens: ‘naming-inflation’ – “naming something this way does not “automagically” realize our aspirations”
• trouxsoftware Fehskens: Today, “enterprise architecture” is routinely used to mean “enterprise IT architecture” #entarch
• Fehskens: names set expectations – we need to be more rigorous about naming (he presents some *very* useful rigour/syntax etc)
• ARSzakal Discord between business and IT results from our separation of the management of the business function and IT operations.
• Fehskens: IT-centric term ‘business architecture’ is convergence of several bad habits of enterprise IT-architects: need to fix this
• mikerollings Allen Brown “if I use the word ‘enterprise’ outside the Open Group crowd, they think I am talking about Star Trek”
• ARSzakal Business Architecture is the business strategy, mission and planning – this evolves in realtime and informs the EITA.
• mikerollings EA as a profession: too broad of a designation. Current certification of someone as an ‘EA’ demands the question “what kind?”
• mikerollings EA as a profession also misses that many outside IT do planning, optimization, and design without calling it ‘EA’ #gartnerea
• BurtonGroupIT Great conversations happening at Open Group Conference Rome and Burton Group’s @mikerollings #burtongroup #gartnerea

David Potter (Quantum Lifecycle Management spotlight)

• Quantum Lifecycle Management: open, trusted whole-of-life lifecycle mgmt for trillions of objects in ‘internet of things’
• omkhar QLM – Quantum Lifecycle Management is the next leap beyond Product Lifecycle Management
• Technodad David Potter introduces Quantum Lifecycle Management group @ – sharing lifecycle info for “Internet of things” http://post.ly/dWez
• industryleaders At Quantum Lifecycle Management Meeting going beyond PLM
• Technodad Jacopo Cassina at #QLM meeting at : how to replicate the “village cobbler” experience across design, supply and service chains

Sebastian Zeeb (Detecon International GmbH): The Business Value of Information – Information Architecture Case Study Telecommunication

• Zeeb: “what’s the use of a common language if nobody wants to talk?”
• Zeeb: “Information need from today’s business require a holistic approach to architecture” – strongly agree
• Zeeb: (exactly what it says – is a detailed case-study for Enterprise Information Management – very useful if you need case-studies)
• 5Di RT @tetradian: Zeeb: “what’s the use of a common language if nobody wants to talk?” > why ‘Values’ and ‘Trust’ are important #vpect
• StevenvtVeld @sebastian_zeeb “holistic approach to architecture” Do you agree this approach is outside IT? Ought to define need. @tetradian
• StevenvtVeld @sebastian_zeeb In practice we see big differences between information and IT professionals. Like demand versus supply. @tetradian
• StevenvtVeld @sebastian_zeeb Ah, you’re talking supplyside Information Architecture. Then what do you mean by holistic?
• StevenvtVeld @sebastian_zeeb Only reason for demand for IT is information. Conceptually this demand must be holistic. Good to see holistic supply

Robin Meehan (Smart421): Producing Metrics to Measure Strategy-Execution Alignment During ADM Phase E / F

• Meehan: “how do we know how well this project portfolio moves us towards the business vision?” – hence need for metrics
• Meehan: “Is the target to have 100% alignment? Not necessarily … stop once you’ve got value from the process” – pragmatics
• Meehan: emphasis on alignment to intended *execution* – alignment to strategy should have been dealt with in previous ADM phases
• Meehan: “if there is no traceable ‘business value’ [in a project or its execution], then why are we doing it?” – stop ‘pet-projects’
• Meehan: (runs a demonstration inside Sparx Enterprise Architect) – good illustration shows where an objective has no IT support etc
• Meehan: if a strategy has no change-project to implement it, it ain’t going to happen…
• Meehan: “[metrics will show that] some projects have no discernable relationship to strategy” – often points to tricky politics
• Meehan: provides a means to test whether strategy is deliverable (or that anyone is actually delivering it) – enforces SMART checks
• Meehan: a lot of the issues are from the strategy side (e.g. implicit, too woolly, ‘pet project’) rather than on the project-side
• Meehan: important to have an ‘innovation-strategy’ item to provide traceability for innovation-projects, don’t hide as ‘pet project’
• Meehan: “not all traceability relationships are equal, not all projects are considered equal” – e.g. 1-5 scale for opportunity-cost
• gfriend Important reminder! RT @tetradian: Meehan: if a strategy has no change-project to implement it, it ain’t going to happen…

Mamdouh Ibrahim / Kevin Daley (IBM) session: Actionable Business Architecture

• Mamdouh Ibrahim / Kevin Daley
• Daley: “is it ‘IT/business alignment’, or ‘IT/business convergence’?” – explicitly places ‘business-architecture’ as part of IT…
• Daley/IBM: (personally I *really* strongly disagree with his very IT-oriented base-assumptions here, but that’s just my opinion…)
• Daley: “split the business conceptually into ‘Strategy & Transformation’ and ‘Operations’” – because they have different worldviews
• Ibrahim (IBM): “addressing #bizarch only as a piece of traditional ([IT-centric) #entarch can be problematic"
• Ibrahim: if bizarch is seen only as IT, business-stakeholders won't/don't participate - also who owns the bizarch?
• Ibrahim: use-cases are the best mechanism to capture *systems* reqmts, but may not be suitable to capture *enterprise* reqmts
• Ibrahim: incorporating bizarch as a critical and business-relevant component of entarch requires a new perspective
• Ibrahim: actionable business architecture may be used/usable for understanding of business on its own [e.g. without assuming IT]
• Daley: “information technology has become almost inseparable from the business itself” – [oh no, not again... rampant IT-centrism]
• Daley: [okay, this is IBM selling tools, but this is exactly what *not* to do with business-architectures... e.g. IT-driven BPR/BPM]
• Daley: [what is 'actionable business architecture'? seems to be 'whatever bizarch can be implemented by IBM automated tools'???]
• Daley/Ibrahim: [an odd presentation - half extreme IT-centrism, half real awareness of bizarch beyond IT]

Salah Musa (Object Computing International): ‘The “Business” in Enterprise Architecture – The Business Value’

• Musa: entarch *must* deliver *demonstrable* business-value – keyword here is ‘demonstrable’ (and “perception is reality”)
• Musa: “is the reason why we need ‘IT/business alignment’ because IT is more broken than any other function within the business?”
• Musa: if IT focus only on cutting costs, can only save a few million; but if focus on creating value, can return far far more
• Musa: [EA defined as a subset of IT - again... how many more years before the discipline can finally break free of this mistake??]
• Musa: “reality, awareness and perceptions are completely different from each other” – yes, that’s important, esp. for #entarch
• Musa: “bizarch building blocks are data, people, function and rules organised by location and timing” [yes, *people*, not just IT]
• Musa: “facilitate change [with] more complete and accurate info for line managers etc to make decisions” [yes, decision-support]
• Musa: “give custodianship of EA to the corporate enterprise! but are they interested, and how?” – good questions

Other sessions

• harta75 Interesting SOA discussion about services and the importance of keeping the service contract stable @#ogrome
• industryleaders Attending to emergence of industry reference architectures in financial markets
• omkhar Very interesting presentation on Cloud Computing ROI by Mark Skilton
• chrisjharding @omkhar We will build on this in the meeting on Business Architecture for Cloud Services at 9:00 tomorrow
• rmeehan Just posted Open Group Rome 2010 day 1 blog – http://smart421.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/open-group-conference-rome-2010-day-1-blog/
• omkhar At a very interesting Realtime / embedded systems group talk.
• harmenberg ArchiMate Forum meeting at: discussing steps to take and futher releases of ArchiMate

Bob Weisman: ‘Using TOGAF 9 in Conjunction with Other Frameworks on Emergency Management Systems’

• Weisman: Web 2.0 is collaboration, it’s not about technology
• Weisman: need a unified architecture in the collaboration environment [architecture is *more* important in agile response, not less]
• Weisman: a key problem is culture: creating willngness to share, then technology (capability to share), policy (rules for sharing)
• Weisman: managing expectations – don’t promise what you can’t deliver – interoperability is much trickier than it looks
• Weisman: pre-planning on governance and resources provides an architecture for the architecture – test in e.g. live simulation
• Weisman: a lot of architectures fail because of implementation issues around acquisition – if you can’t get it you can’t build it!
• Weisman: “pick the content metamodel” – too many to choose from? (MODAF/OMG UPDM etc etc) but all implementable, all maintained
• Weisman: [my own opinion: this is _much_ more real-world than the finance/insurance etc models we usually see for TOGAF etc]
• Weisman: for interoperability, re-use and extend existing models (incl. arch. models), don’t create new ones w/o v.good reason
• CH_FEDARCH @tetradian I agree, government cases are *real world* and are insightful – especially for other gvmt guys…
• Weisman: (provides a crossmap between TOGAF phases, DODAF deliverables, UML etc models to ‘get everyone on same page’)
• Weisman: people talk about interoperability, but as soon as they have to *do* it, they tend to back away…
• Weisman: capability: ability of a person, process or organisation to provide business value
• Weisman: models for interoperability for emergency-response will be available publicly in the fairly near future

Sanda Morar (Cognizant): ‘Integrating TOGAF Architecture Development Method with Other Enterprise-wide Processes’

• Morar: TOGAF spec says that “in all cases” adaptation will be required – ie. the ‘standard’ is not an out-of-the-box standard
• Morar: a lot of talk about mapping (between TOGAF and other frameworks), but info was not that much actual help in integrating them
• Morar: (appears to be a crossmapping of TOGAF phases with Zachman layers – row-1 to row-5? struggling with proprietary IP again..)
• Morar: diagram suggests that TOGAF metamodel needs entities for lifecycle, technical constraint – good point
• Morar: (focus of their MLR model is requirements rather than architecture as such, but there is a useful crossmap between them)
• Morar: [my opinion: this is again showing the fundamental problem with TOGAF's fixed IT-specific B/C/D scope - ADM needs open scope]
• Morar: crossmap to TOGAF metamodel provides a very valuable crosscheck – gaps in their own model “jump out” from the comparison

Other sessions

• omkhar My Security in the Cloud presentation begins at 4pm local
• jim_hietala Listening to @omkhar and Stuart Boardman describe great progress on a cloud security reference architecture at
• harmenberg Useful meeting of ArchiMate Forum at, with a number of concrete steps to take the coming month(s).
• harmenberg Alexander den Hartog (Boskalis) presents on the use of ArchiMate at Boskalis.
• harta75 Had a lot of questions about use of Archimate in Boskalis at. Always good to have discussions after a presentation.
• rmeehan Blog from Open Group Rome 2010 day 2 posted http://smart421.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/open-group-conference-rome-2010-day-2-blog/
• rmeehan Good event – well done to Open Group organisers. Any event with wine at lunch time every day has got to be good )

Note that it explores just one question: what do we need to change in the TOGAF ADM to make it usable for any architecture purpose and any scope in whole-of-enterprise architecture. See my other presentations on Slideshare for other aspects of whole-of-enterprise architecture practice.

For readability I’ve reversed the order so that the tweets are listed earliest-first, and I’ve edited the content slightly to remove RT ‘retweet’ duplications and general ‘personal-stuff’, so as to concentrate on what was said or commented-on during the actual presentations. But otherwise it’s the same as you’ll find on Twitter with the search-hashtag #oghk. Quite long, of course, so you’ll find the rest of this post after the ‘More…’ link.

• tetradian (hashtag #oghk is Open Group Hong Kong enterprise architecture http://bit.ly/MXWI0 – apologies if it’s not relevant to you)
• a_josey Follow The Open Group Hong Kong Conference Oct 19-21 on mobile devices http://bit.ly/3whJIq Photos on flickr http://bit.ly/11Kpkh
• Technodad If you are at The Open Group meeting in Hong Kong, don’t forget to use the hashtag #oghk when liveblogging on… http://ff.im/-a39g1
• Technodad Robert Xu, Chairman of Kingdee, keynotes “Enterprise Architecture Supporting the Chinese Management Model” at #oghk http://post.ly/9A29
• tetradian Robert Xu (in Mandarin) Chinese Business Philosophy includes Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist influences
• stevenunn Robert Xu at #oghk describes Chinese management philosophy, based on Confucius, Taoism, Buddhism, 8 Glory and 8 Disgraces. A complex blend.
• tetradian Robert Xu Confucian emphasizes moral strength, Taoism emphasises forces of nature, Buddhist emp. power of consciousness
• stevenunn Robert Xu at #oghk talks of EA as the foundation of strategy execution, TOGAF should be used to develop EA within the Operating Model.
• theopengroup Great to see the TOGAF ADM in Mandarin during Robert Chu’s keynote presentation at #oghk
• tetradian Xu: example given is a food-products company (i.e. *not* the usual bank/finance/insurance TOGAF example)
• tetradian Xu: cross-links b/w TOGAF + business-arch + APQC for acquisition case study
• tetradian Xu: new Chinese business emphasis on export of management theory/consultancy in addition to manufacturing etc
• tetradian Allen Brown “as enterprise architects we’re not just in the IT world” hooray!!!
• theopengroup SOA Source Book published by Open Group SOA Working Group. http://ow.ly/v7GU
• stevenunn Heather Kreger of IBM reports on a productive quarter for The Open Group SOA Work Group. SOA tutorials being delivered this week at #oghk
• tetradian Japanese contingent very pleased to see Buddhist philosophy included within Chinese Business Philosophy <agree
• theopengroup SOA Governance Framework for Open Group’s SOA Workgroup (free download, registration required) http://ow.ly/v7Jw #oghk #SOA
• stevenunn Simon Chan of IBM Asia Pacific presents on “Building a Smarter Planet with SOA” at #oghk
• stevenunn Simon Chan at #oghk shows how SOA can help solve water resourcing issues. Can someone please tell the UK water authorities?!
• Technodad Simon Chan of IBM give use case for SOA and instrumented , interconnected and intelligent network for smart management of water supply
• tetradian Simon Chan great presentation on use of sensors for real-time Sense-Analyse-Respond <next Cynefin layer is Probe-Sense-Respond? 3 days ago from TweetDeck
• stevenunn Eric Boulay at #oghk encourages getting involved in the Localization Standing Ctee of The Open Group Architecture Forum.
• tetradian Walter Stahlecker on Business Architecture Working Group – “what ‘business’ really means in EA: how Enterprise creates intended value”
• tetradian Stahlecker ‘holistic EA’ architecture of enterprise + ‘chemistry’ how enterprise deploys capabilities inc. its IT
• tetradian importance of preventing IT people from redefining ‘service’ in ways that don’t make sense to business people!
• tetradian Harding: “Service Orientation as a business principle is not new!” <agree strongly – ‘services’ in generic sense
• tetradian Harding: “software…delivers services in the same way as people” <*but* importance of interoperability b/w human & s/w services
• theopengroup Chris Harding, Director of The Open Group SOA Work Group, shares his thoughts on SOA today and in the future at #oghk
• tetradian Harding: traditional IT architectures hinder ‘boundaryless info flow’ – need services orientation to support freer flow
• enterprisearchs Chris Harding on SOA: “services” were around long before IT. Business already thinks in these terms…
• tetradian Harding: you should not assume that you make SOA work in your enterprise – “SOA can fail spectacularly”, needs care/awareness
• tetradian Harding: governance is widely recognised as crucial in service-orientation – likewise importance of architecture
• tetradian Harding: successful SOA requires good architecture, good governance – see SOA Source Book http://bit.ly/30QpmO
• tetradian Harding SOA: “buying the latest product does not guarantee success” <agree strongly – beware vendor hype!
• stevenunn Chris Harding of The Open Group describes the role of Cloud Computing in SOA at #oghk
• tetradian Harding: SOA and Cloud – processes and systems <if everyone using same cloud services, need whole-of-enterprise arch to differentiate
• enterprisearchs ‘SOA as a service’ would deliver many benefits, particularly in reducing upfront costs, accelerating SOA takeup: Harding
• tetradian Harding SOA: focus on core competencies, participate increasingly in ‘ecosystems’ <again, importance of true #entarch
• Technodad Chris Harding presents “SOA as a Service” as enabler for wider uptake of SOA – market of services running on Cloud infrastructures
• enterprisearchs …leading to more frequent participation in business ecosystems = greater value for everyone: Harding
• theopengroup Chris Harding “SOA as a Service on the Cloud could dramatically accelerate take-up of SOA & enable greater enterprise virtualization”
• stevenunn Universal Data Element Framework is a key focus of The Open Group Semantic Interoperability Work Group, Chris Harding tells #oghk
• tetradian real-time embedded systems – sensors etc also need boundaryless information flow <”internet of things” etc
• stevenunn Joe Bergmann of The Open Group Real-time & Embedded Systems Forum talks of the open systems modular approach to architecture at #oghk
• tetradian real-time systems: ‘cyber-physical systems’ – “need to look at the whole picture, including the human side” of systems
• richardveryard @tetradian #oghk I wish Stahlecker would use the word ‘holistic’ as it is defined in Wikipedia.
• tetradian Uppal: how do we as architects show management that we deliver value in their terms?
• tetradian Uppal: have to *measure* value of architecture in order to prove its value – usefulness of structured scorecards etc
• tetradian Uppal: before you can do ‘enterprise architecture’, you need to define what ‘enterprise’ means!
• tetradian Uppal: 4 drivers for all orgs (varying priority): operating costs, risks, growth (internal focus), growth (external focus)
• tetradian: (Uppal): architecture faces towards problem (generics/patterns), design faces towards solution (specifics)
• tetradian Uppal: the value of architecture isn’t about how good the model is, it’s about whether it solves the specified problem
• tetradian Yao: Western learning (knowledge, sense) synergy with Eastern learning (wisdom, sensibility)
• tetradian Yao: yin and yang, everything changing, contain each other <business and IT as yin and yang? each contains the other
• tetradian Yao: of 262 attendees on Beijing Univ course for CIOs, *none* had previously implemented any EA in their org
• tetradian Yao: key benefit of EA is “guide the integration of informatization and industrialization” 3 days ago from TweetDeck
• enterprisearchs Yao: China has a department dedicated to “informatization”, apparently a commonly used term there (at least the Chinese equivalent)
• tetradian Yao: PBORS framework: Planning-Building-Operation (lifecycle), Resource mgmt, Security – see www.BDRit.org
• richardveryard Following with interest @tetradian tweeting from the Open Group Hong Kong enterprise architecture conference #oghk – thanks Tom
• tetradian Uppal: too much ent-arch you have ivory tower, too much soln-arch you have point-solutions – need to balance for sustainability
• tetradian important not just to find the problem but to ind and work with the person who has the problem!
• tetradian Uppal: the bulk of your total project spend isn’t on IT, it’s on the process-changes to work with the new IT!
• tetradian two different goals – IT improving the (internal) business of IT, vs improving business *of* IT
• chrisjharding Bob Chu covered many topics, including SOA China Work Group and Kingdee’s experience with SOA
• chrisjharding Leonardo Ramirez Gonzalez gave great case study on SOA and TOGAF in retail sector
• chrisjharding Chris Greenslade started SOA tutorials series with Impact of SOA. Questions were mainly on SOA Maturity and OSIMM – interesting!
• theopengroup Allen Brown talks about ‘Drinking your Own Champagne” : Using TOGAF in The Open Group
• stevenunn Allen Brown, The Open Group President & CEO, gives a great case study on using TOGAF in a small/medium enterprise at #oghk
• Technodad Great discussion in RT&ES Forum at #oghk on how to extend TOGAF to architect validatable high assurance systems.
• theopengroup Allen Brown’s TOGAF case study and templates used in the project available on the memory sticks distributed at #oghk
• tetradian Allen Brown on using TOGAF in Open Group – nice realism about what does/doesn’t work – “life goes on; stakeholders have day jobs”
• stevenunn The Open Group announces the availability of TOGAF(TM) 9 exams in Mandarin through The Open Group China
• tetradian Allen Brown, TOGAF in Open Group: “TOGAF forces you to think at all levels/phases; avoids the leap to solution space”
• tetradian TOGAF Architecture Forum has 215 members – clearly consensus will not be easy, impressive to gain consensus at all!
• theopengroup TOGAF 9 certification running at 3 times the rate (600) that it was at the same point (10 months in) for TOGAF 8 (200)
• stevenunn Geoff McClelland of Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group gives an EA practitioner’s perspective at #oghk. Great to see him back at The Open Group!
• tetradian McClelland (Dairy Farm Group): main business driver for architecture is reduced risk – business, technical, other
• tetradian McClelland: architecture a process not a document; needs business-led technology plan
• tetradian McClelland: key challenges: must be continually actionable/affordable, understandable by senior execs, business-driven
• stevenunn Geoff McClelland gives a great update to Dairy Farm Group TOGAF case study he first gave 11 years ago. They started with TOGAF(TM) 4!
• stevenunn “High levels of security have to accompany luxury in the hospitality industry now”, Geoff McClelland of Mandarin Oriental tells #oghk
• tetradian McClelland: complexity even of technical architecture in hotels – need interoperability with many others
• theopengroup McClelland of Jardine Matheson – 11 years of using TOGAF. Some valuable lessons from Dairy Farm Group case study
• tetradian McClelland HTNG (Hotel Technology Next Generation) is hotel-industry equiv of telecoms’ eTOM/NGOSS? (400 members)
• theopengroup “Hotel Next Generation (HTNG) could not have achieved what it has without The Open Group’s consortium services” Geoff McClelland tells #oghk
• tetradian McClelland interoperability/architecture etc “focus on real needs of real customers who have real checkbooks!”
• stevenunn Geoff McClelland at #oghk stresses the importance to HTNG of mandating products certified by The Open Group
• tetradian Garry Doherty: ArchiMate notation adds value to TOGAF – “independent modelling language for EA”
• tetradian Shen Min (CapGemini): (he’s speaking in Mandarin – wild rush for the simultaneous translation headsets!)
• tetradian Shen: “application-landscapes are (nearly) never built greenfield” <need to keep existing apps live whilst developing
• theopengroup Metaplexity Associates announced as the first organization to achieve full accreditation from The Open Group for TOGAF 9 training.
• tetradian Shen: “EA is more thanIT, it must include your business, your new business model, must be for all your execs”
• tetradian Shen: CapGemini IAF framework: four themes Why? (contextual) What? (conceptual) How? (logical) With what? (physical)
• eatraining: Put your money where your mouth is with the OpenGroup ITAC certification program. http://bit.ly/19AoKX
• enterprisearchs Craig Martin presents on ‘Using TOGAF’: initial focus on the differences between EA & Solution Architecture
• enterprisearchs Martin: Most business (including IT) activity is a waste of time and will not contribute to desired results. EA seeks to tackle this.
• enterprisearchs Martin: Value in EA is not about creating solutions in isolation, its about looking at the whole business and orchestrating
• enterprisearchs Martin: TOGAF is a meta-framework that provides an overarching structure for any EA framework to be applied
• enterprisearchs Martin: we need to apply an architecture value model to rate the performance of each arch building block
• tetradian Banger: fundamental activities of architects: Control, Inform, Direct
• tetradian Banger: biggest challenges are funding and governance: “he who controls funding controls the governance”
• tetradian Fehskens: “how do I make EA real? I don’t want big document that just sits on shelf and gathers dust…”
• enterprisearchs Martin: EA Project Manager is a key role missing in vast majority of EA practices http://twitpic.com/m7yiq
• tetradian Fehskens “adapt rather than adopt/build; incremental evolution, not a ‘big project’ at huge cost; be methodical”
• enterprisearchs Martin: EA Project Manager is a key role missing in vast majority of EA practices http://twitpic.com/m7yiq
• tetradian Fehskens: technology-infrastructure arch sits easily within IT domain, gets harder to control standardization as we move up the stack
• tetradian Fehskens: EAs tend to focus on models as ‘the fun part’, but key to growing EITA is solution by solution, via principles
• tetradian Fehskens: derive principles from vision mission goals objectives of the organization – “guide decisions, tradeoffs, priorities”
• enterprisearchs Martin: where solutioning fits into the TOGAF ADM http://twitpic.com/m7yzz
• tetradian Fehskens “nobody implements an enterprise architecture as such, it’s implemented via solutions, how h/w & s/w are *used*”
• tetradian Fehskens: derive principles from values; derive requirements from principles; need external framework to validate reqs
• enterprisearchs Martin: EA needs a strategy & operating model calibrated to the current and desired EA maturity level
• tetradian Fehskens: requirements that don’t link to principles probably don’t contribute to solution …
• tetradian Fehskens …principles that don’t have any matching requirements probably indicate reqs that have been overlooked!
• tetradian Fehskens every solution generates new content for the enterprise architecture – i.e. *grow* the architecture
• enterprisearchs Martin: CRUD matrix helps me expose the data elements that i can expose as a service, being ‘Information as a Service’ & start of SOA
• richardveryard @tetradian So for Fehskens “Principle” seems to play the same role as “Policy” does in #vpect ?
• richardveryard @tetradian I like the sound of what Fehskens is saying, does he have the detail to back it up, if so where? (Link please.)
• tetradian Yong: map TOGAF to 5 business-lifecycle phases: startup, emerging, established, expanding, exit
• enterprisearchs Judith Jones: Open Group has not yet agreed on a concise definition for Enterprise Architecture
• tetradian definition of EA: see >130 one-liner defns! in LinkedIn discussion http://bit.ly/4buKPn
• enterprisearchs Jones: EA is the structure to support business transformation
• enterprisearchs Jones: managing risk is a key driver for EA
• eatraining Jones: TOGAF 9 has moved into the business and strategy space. It is not the same space as what TOGAF 8 was in.
• enterprisearchs Jones: TOGAF 9 gives an org the baseline ability to create an EA, and to a level consistent with what the current industry can handle
• a_josey New accredited TOGAF 9 training course for Arismore. Now 17 accredited courses. http://bit.ly/13QZ1w
• jim_hietala interesting presentation from Zhao Wei, Knownsec, at #oghk on China malware industry
• Technodad NextView at #OGHK #Cloudcomputing track: Platform, system mgmt standards more important than cloud-specific APIs to deploy scalable service
• Technodad BTW, notes from at #OGHK #Cloudcomputing track are being posted on public Cloudsters wiki at http://snipr.com/cloudsters
• tetradian finished my presentation on “Using TOGAF beyond IT” – time to head back to Britain
• enterprisearchs A simple EA definition to consider: Enterprise Architecture (noun)= The structural details to execute a strategy
• erikproper @enterprisearchs That would apply to a normal design as well .. it too provides strctrl details, and it too can be argued to ex. strat
• enterprisearchs Last try for 2day: EA is the practice of detailing the structure of a venture to both inform and execute its strategy #EAdef
• bartleeten Open Group Hong Kong material is available: http://bit.ly/1ueCof #oghk #entarch

[ends]

Quick summary: seems to have been very worthwhile. More evidence of the shift towards the realisation that enterprise-architecture is about more than just IT: in fact that’s now being explicitly stated just about everywhere at the conference, though ‘the usual suspects’ are still doing not-very-much to move out of the comfort-zone of detail-level IT.

Probably the most interesting area was the formal presentation of the ‘Chinese Management Model’, apparently a government-sponsored (or at least government-promoted) model which combines some Western thinking with more traditional Chinese philosophy, drawn from Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism and more recent Chinese views (Eight Glory and Eight Disgrace). Much of this – particularly Taoism and Buddhism – aligns well with the systems-theory frameworks that we need in order to model organisational complexity, so there’s a strong synergy there. Other local presenters, such as Professor Yao Le of Beijing University, emphasised the importance of balance across multiple dimensions and domains, using the classic yin/yang metaphor, contrasted to linear Taylorist ‘scientific management’. Definitely a case of ‘Watch This Space’, it seems.

Another item of wry amusement was the difference between Western and Chinese concepts of timescale and scope. Here in the West – especially in the US/Anglo context – we struggle to get business-folks to think any further than the next financial-quarter – or at very best perhaps a five- to ten-year future – and to think of any scope wider than their immediate context. By contrast, the first slide shown by the first plenary speaker, Robert Xu of software-house Kingdee International, started by showing the Chinese view of recent economic history, summarising the whole globe, starting in 1750 – in other words a quarter-millennium, not the usual Western quarter-year! A very different sense of realism, and very refreshing.

Back to catch-up: a fair bit to post to this weblog, of which the first will be a dump of the Twitter-stream from the conference. More later, then.

TOGAF is often associated with IT architecture, as opposed to the business-driven, holistic enterprise architecture espoused by the US Federal government.

John argues that whilst there’s still room for improvement, TOGAF 9 is much more business-focussed than the previous versions:

The present TOGAF definition of enterprise architecture – although holistic – doesn’t seem very business-driven: “…the description of an enterprise as a system in terms of its components, their inter-relationships, and the principles and guidelines governing the design and its evolution.” Contrast this to a definition suggested by Paul van der Merwe to be included in the next release of TOGAF: “The continuous practice of describing the essential elements of a sociotechnical organization, their relationships to each other and to the environment, in order to understand complexity and manage change.”

He then points to the TOGAF ADM (Architecture Development Method) as the solution. But to me the current structure of the ADM is a key part of the problem, not the solution. Since John asked “What are your thoughts? Is TOGAF too IT-centric for your agency? I’d very much like to hear your opinion”, I appended the following comments to his post:

The short answer to “Is TOGAF 9 too IT-centric for your agency?” depends on two factors:

• whether you think enterprise architecture is primarily about the relationship between business and IT, versus whether it’s about the enterprise as a whole, of which IT is only one small part;
• whether the work of the agency is centred around information (eg. IRS), versus some other domain(s) (eg. Parks & Environment)

If your concern is more with the first side of both of those two spectra – the business/IT relationship, in an information-oriented agency – then TOGAF 9 will be a very good fit, with TOGAF 9 a valued improvement over the previous version. For those contexts, the short answer would be ‘No’: TOGAF is not too IT-centric for the agency.

But the fit becomes progressively worse as you move to the other side of either of those spectra. Unlike FEAF, TOGAF has almost no concept of people (FEAF’s ‘Human Capital’), or of physical things other than IT-infrastructure (FEAF’s ‘Other Fixed Assets’). If your need is to build a whole-of-enterprise view for an agency that deals primarily with people or with physical things, TOGAF 9 provides little real gain over TOGAF 8. It’s true there are a few real improvements – such as the section on Capability-Based Planning – but in some ways it anchors the architecture even more rigidly into the IT domain. For those contexts, the short answer would be ‘Yes’: as it stands, TOGAF would definitely be too IT-centric – and in some cases even dangerously so.

The key problem-area is one of scope. The TOGAF 9 ADM retains from the previous version exactly the same fixed IT-centric scope, with a linear progression from ‘Business Architecture’ – in essence, “everything not-IT” – through ‘Information Systems’ to ‘Technology Infrastructure’. The end-point is always to clarify the design and structure of the IT-systems: everything else is peripheral to that purpose. If the architecture has any other purpose – as it will do in most agencies, especially as architecture maturity develops – the current design of the TOGAF ADM may become an active hindrance almost every step of the way.

(In principle the new section on Iterations should relieve this to some extent, but the iterations concept is not well-enough described to be useful in practice: in essence the ‘new’ ADM is still a Waterfall model with a few half-hearted attempts at Agile vaguely tacked on, with a governance model that fits neither approach well enough to be reliable – especially at an enterprise-wide scale.)

The ADM principle is sound, and provides a much-needed methodology that FEAF lacks. But for anything other than IT-oriented ‘enterprise’-architecture in information-centred agencies, TOGAF 9 is usable only if we can break free from the existing ADM’s fixed IT-centric scope. To do this, we need to rethink the detailed structure and sequence of the ADM, whilst retaining the overall principles of the methodology.

Key requirements for such a revision include:

• stronger support and governance for Agile-style iterations
• support for consistent management of iterations of any duration and any level of nesting
• support for any architecture scope, dependent on the needs of each iteration
• explicit removal of any assumptions about the centrality of IT

The latter requirement also supports architectural assessment of contexts where IT may not be involved or even available, such as in process-design and planning for some disaster-recovery/business-continuity scenarios.

For one example of one such modified version of the TOGAF ADM, see http://tetradianbooks.com/2008/10/silos-method-ref/. A matching framework to identify scope for architecture iterations is at http://tetradianbooks.com/2008/12/silos-frame-ref/.

• “A framework for whole-of-enterprise architecture” – the amended-Zachman reference-sheet from Bridging the Silos: enterprise architecture for IT-architects
  
• “A revised TOGAF ADM for whole-of-enterprise architecture development” – the amended-ADM reference-sheet from Bridging the Silos: enterprise architecture for IT-architects
• “Power and Response-ability – a workplace ‘Manifesto’” – the PDF version of the ‘manifesto’ from the Introduction to Power and Response-ability: the human side of systems
  • (note: a Powerpoint version of the ‘manifesto’ is also available on Slideshare)

A minor glitch in that they ended up as ‘Presentations’ rather than ‘Documents’: anyone know how to fix this? There doesn’t seem to be anything about it in the rather limited online help on Slideshare itself: odd…

Hope it helps, anyways.

(Before I go any further, a note to all in the TOGAF training/education community: from what you’ve read elsewhere, you may at present believe that I’ve been attacking you personally. As you’ll see below, this is not the case – so please accept my apologies for others’ interpretations of what I wrote. Do read on – and thank you.)

There are a few Tweets going round that suggests I’m attacking TOGAF (again), this time by suggesting that TOGAF training is worse than useless:

harsh deduction by @tetradian: TOGAF certification almost an indication that one is NOT capable of doing #EA

“… close to … a TOGAF certification is an indication that someone is not capable of doing enterprise architecture.” http://bit.ly/uZDZd

I’ll admit my original post summarising the London TOGAF conference last month does indeed include that latter quoted text. But it’s quoted way out of context: so please, do read the whole post before you jump to that conclusion! – because it isn’t what I’m saying at all.

First, it’s not my own ‘deduction’: it’s a near-verbatim report from a broader discussion at the TOGAF conference. From the certification perspective, four key themes came up from the conference, all from leading members of the TOGAF community:

• the reference-architectures (Part VI of the TOGAF spec: ‘Technical Reference Model’ and ‘Integrated Information Infrastructure Reference Model’) are way out of date, and at the least need a complete overhaul, if not dumped altogether [that was from the Open Group's lead Allen Brown, in one of the plenary sessions]
• “almost no-one” uses the ADM in the form described in the TOGAF specification [in my last post I said I thought that was one of the guys from Deloitte, but my notes indicate it was Mike Lambert from Architecting the Enterprise, one of the lead TOGAF training groups]
• enterprise architecture is much broader than IT, and must now encompass the whole of the enterprise [that theme came up at least a dozen times, in plenary sessions and elsewhere]
• enterprise architecture needs to be understood as a professional discipline, comparable to other professional disciplines such as medicine and building-architecture [again, many people, but particularly Len Fehskens, Open Group VP on Skills and Capabilities]

These are all points that, yes, I have personally pushed hard over the past few years: but you can see from the above that it’s not just me that’s saying it – it’s being echoed now right from the centre of the TOGAF community itself. (Just this once, I’m not ‘the Outsider’ here! <wrygrin>)

So, to the problem of certification. The key point is that certification alone is not an indication of professional competence. Back in my aero-engineering days, it was common knowledge that newly-graduated engineers were a potentially lethal danger to everyone in the place: they knew just enough to think that they knew what they were doing, with that arrogant certainty of the newly-qualified, but had no idea of how to work with the subtle complexities and constraints of the real world of engineering. For example, they would specify components that couldn’t actually be made, or assemblies that could be made but couldn’t physically be assembled. Even for the best, it usually took a year or two at least “to learn how to make my mathematics sufficiently imprecise to be usable”, as one of them put it. Crucially, there were a few who never learnt that lesson, and instead clung on to their certification as ‘proof’ that they were competent – which in practice more proved that they were not competent to be let loose on a real aircraft. Or, in this context, a real enterprise.

On its own – and again I’ll emphasise, on its own – an enterprise architecture certification does not and cannot indicate competence: it needs to be balanced by real-world practice. For which, again, crucially, this profession at present has no means to monitor or measure.

Next, look at what’s actually covered in the existing TOGAF certification: it’s primarily about the ‘standard’ ADM and the reference-models – which are no longer used in that form in practice. And – as also indicated in those themes from the conference – real enterprise architecture is much, much broader than IT: yet everything in the existing certification is centred on IT. So anyone who does slavishly follow the ‘standard’ will be almost guaranteed to create an architecture that might at first seem ‘efficient’, but will be so outdated, so IT-centric and so far off the real mark that it will at best be useless, and possibly much worse than that.

What the old TOGAF 8 certification exam did not cover was how to adapt the ADM to the enterprise, or how to create reference models and use them for compliance-monitoring and risk-management – which is what is actually most needed in those stages of architecture that the TOGAF spec aims to cover. And there’s no way that any of that kind of context-dependent knowledge could be assessed in a simplistic multiple-choice exam such as is still used for TOGAF certification. As I mentioned in the previous post, I nearly failed my TOGAF exam because in many parts of the test, none of the options shown on the screen actually matched what I knew from experience works in practice, and the nearest available guess turned out to be ‘wrong’ according to the specification in the book. Conversations at the conference made it clear that I was far from alone in that experience: in effect, anyone who presents a high score in their TOGAF certification may have the book-knowledge but know nothing about the practice, whereas many will score low because they are competent in practice. So as it stands, the TOGAF certification not only tells us nothing about professional competence, but can be actively misleading: a high score may well indicate that someone is not competent to do the work, whereas a low score indicates either high competence or complete failure, with no apparent means to distinguish between those two extremes.

All of which adds up to a serious problem.

It does not, however, mean that TOGAF training is wrong. Quite the opposite: many of the trainers I talked with at the conference made it clear that their training-courses emphasise the importance of adaptation of the ADM, development and use of reference-models, and all the other skills needed to assess and adapt to the enterprise context, and how to extend EA beyond the IT domain itself. To develop those professional skills, we’re likely to need more training, not less; and much of that training needs to be context-specific, too. The catch is that almost none of this material is in the current TOGAF specification, and none at all is assessed in the current TOGAF certification. So yes, whilst to my mind the TOGAF specification is still annoyingly limited and limiting, that’s not the real problem in this case. The point here is that, as it stands, the TOGAF certification is not only meaningless but actively misleading: and right now that is a real, genuine, active, in-your-face, fundamental problem for the profession.

This is a problem that’s being addressed: as I said in the previous post, Len Fehskens is specifically tasked with this on behalf of the Open Group, and others are tackling it in other ways with other groups. But we must first acknowledge that it is a real problem, and one that won’t go away simply by ignoring it, which is all that had been happening to date. So, yes, whilst it’s an uncomfortable fact to face, one of the key signs that the EA profession is maturing as a profession is that it is now willing to face up to such uncomfortable facts.

‘Bad’ news that’s good news all round, in fact.

And the print-version is now available on both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk – those two links point direct to the respective Amazon detail-page. For other online retailers, or your local friendly independent bookstore – like the ever-helpful Red Lion Books in Colchester – use the ISBN book-number: 978-1-906681-18-0

I’ll also have copies to hand out at the TOGAF conference in central London next week – see you there, perhaps?

Please pass the word on for me, if you would? Many thanks!

TOGAF 9 includes a well-described architecture capability-maturity model. This session, illustrated with practical examples from a wide range of industries, explores how to use the maturity ‘stepping stones’ to guide the choice and sequence of architecture activities, in a way that expands outward to engage the whole enterprise.

The ‘takeaways’ would be as follows:

• how to use TOGAF 9 at a whole-of-enterprise scope
• how to use the TOGAF 9 maturity-model as architecture ‘stepping-stones’
• how to use enterprise values to bridge across the IT/business divide

In other words, the same overall themes that I’ve been pushing hard for a couple of years now, about how to adapt TOGAF and the like to work with the real enterprise, rather than solely the tiny subset that is its IT.

Variation this time is that I’m using the TOGAF maturity-model (adapted from COBIT or CMMI, I believe?) to show why we need to do things in what is actually a very different order from what TOGAF itself suggests, and why we have to bend the TOGAF-ADM quite radically in order to make it work for the real enterprise.

The detail for all of this will be in my upcoming book Doing Enterprise Architecture: process and practice in the real enterprise – which I now definitely have to finish and get published in time for the conference! (I’m still just about on schedule, but the timing will be tight – wish me luck, perhaps?)

And if you’re going to TOGAF London, I look forward to seeing you there.