Yet is all as it seems? I’d have to admit that the conference-programme does worry me a bit. Despite the presence of a fair few people with a broader view than just IT – Alex Osterwalder, Len Fehskens and Stuart Boardman, to name just a few – so much of it still seems to be the same-old search for the ‘next big thing’, the next soon-to-fail IT-based magic-bullet: currently ‘Big Data’, mobility, cloud, cloud and more cloud. Oh well.

A bit of history might be relevant here. Back at the start of the 20th century, the electric motor was the great ‘next big thing’. Huge excitement! – huge hype! – the electric motor will solve everything! No doubt that it transformed industry: freed at last from that terrifying tangle of belts and pulleys, machines now placed wherever fits the workflow, smaller, more compact, more convenient. A whole new infrastructure to power it, control it, monitor it, measure it, manage it.

(Sounds familiar, perhaps?)

And finally, when electric motors were literally everywhere, embedded in almost everything, the realisation that although the electric-motor is an important enabler, it’s only an enabler: isn’t the enterprise itself.

The enterprise isn’t solely about machines, or information, or ‘making money’: it usually includes all of those things somewhere within the overall picture, but first and foremost it’s about the hopes and desires and aims of people. If we ever forget that fact, there’s no space for enterprise – and hence nothing against which enterprise-architecture, or enterprise-transformation, could ever make sense.

As Simon Sinek puts it, any enterprise-scope work must always start with ‘why’: the ‘how’ and ‘with-what’ come later in the story. And for enterprise-architecture that ‘why’ must always be about the whole of the scope – not solely about some arbitrarily-selected subset. Open Group’s TOGAF is excellent for enterprise IT-architecture; yet its rigid focus on IT (as defined in sections B, C and D of its Architecture Development Method) renders it problematic at best for anything else in the enterprise-architecture space. It’s fixable, as I’ve explained at various Open Group conferences and elsewhere over the past five years or so: yet still that kind of update has not been applied to the ADM, and in that sense TOGAF 9 represented a sadly-missed opportunity. As a profession, we need to do better than that.

To give some idea of what I mean by ‘the enterprise’ – and hence its architecture and its transformation – take a look at some of the projects I’m exploring at present in Latin America:

• a medium-sized brewer needing to resolve problems with internal theft
• a large manufacturer addressing multi-way ‘cultural translation’ between Asian ownership and executive, US management and methods, and Latin engineers and workforce
• a government department working with a film-producer to use social-media to break the cycle of mutual distrust between police and schoolkids and teenagers in the slum-districts
• an NGO wanting to use the ubiquity of cell-phones as a means to improve health-care in widely-dispersed indigenous communities

It’s likely that in each of these contexts, an enterprise IT-architecture will play some important part: but the IT itself is not the sole focus of the overall task. To make any of those transformations work, we need to start from people, not IT – start from enterprise as enterprise – and keep that whole enterprise in mind at every moment.

It may well be that enterprise-architecture is dead – but if so, it was killed by inanely inappropriate IT-centrism, in Open Group and elsewhere. As we move to a nominally broader-based enterprise-transformation, could more effort be made to ensure that we do not repeat the same IT-centric mistakes? Please?

• rtolido: interesting stuff coming soon around a global Business Architect certification standard by The Open Group #ogsfo

Important to say here that I have enormous respect for Ron: quite apart from his senior role at CapGemini, he’s also an amazing innovator in IT-architecture and enterprise-architecture, with ideas such as Slow IT, the importance of a demolition strategy, and the SCOOTER metaphor. Yet I must admit I was absolutely horrified at that comment above, and said so:

• tetradian: @rtolido IT-centrism in TOGAF etc has crippled #entarch for half a decade: please don’t let OG do the same to #bizarch as well…

The point is that, given their track-record so far on business-architecture,  I can hardly think of any organisation that’s less qualified than Open Group to create such a standard. For Pete’s sake, even the Piddletrenthide Parish Parent-Teacher Panel would probably do a better job of it…

And no, I’m not being nasty here – I’m serious about this. The utter shambles that is TOGAF’s ‘Phase B: Business Architecture’ should sound clangorous alarm-bells about any such suggestion: it’s just a random collection of ‘anything not-IT that might affect IT’, with no structure, no symmetry and no sense. If you want to see how so much of so-called ‘enterprise’-architecture actively increases the infamous ‘business/IT-divide’, you need only to take a careful look at the TOGAF specification for its ADM Phase B. And these people seriously consider themselves competent to define a global certification for business-architecture? No way! – please…?

Anyway, my Tweet-response above triggered a reply from Ron:

• rtolido: @tetradian it’s an IT thing to criticize IT-centrism but after all: #entarch is an IT people invention. Let’s try to do better with #bizarch

To which my first response was ‘What the…?‘, which came out in more polite form on Twitter as this:

• tetradian: @rtolido “it’s an IT thing… entarch is IT-invention” – disagree on both counts, but yes, please let’s do better with bizarch…

Let’s tackle Ron’s points in reverse order…

At least there’s an acknowledgement that we could do better with business-architecture than has been done with those current attempts at ‘enterprise’-architecture. That’s something. Good.

On “#entarch is an IT-people invention”, it isn’t. That’s a convenient myth that IT-people want to believe – though no doubt a fair few of them will want to throw various historical quotes at me to ‘prove’ their provenance. Sure, the term ‘architecture’ has long since been linked to IT – almost half a century, by now. And somewhen around a couple of decades back, some bright spark extended that idea to distinguish between a context-specific IT-architecture versus an IT-architecture at organisation-wide or enterprise-wide scope, as ‘enterprise-wide IT-architecture’ – at which point some idiot conflated that nominally-valid term to a no-doubt ‘simpler’ shorthand term as ‘enterprise-architecture’, without any awareness of just how misleading that would be, or how much damage that term-hijack would cause. Yet reality is that there are many long-established business disciplines such as systems-thinking and design-thinking as applied to the enterprise that have a much better natural fit with the term ‘enterprise-architecture’; the original meaning of ‘business-analysis’ was also probably very close, too. In short, ‘enterprise IT-architecture’ is arguably “an IT-people invention”; but enterprise-architecture most definitely is not.

On “it’s a IT thing to criticise IT-centrism”, I’m not quite sure what Ron means there – whether only ‘IT-people’ have the right to do so, or else that anyone criticising IT-centrism is inherently self-identifying as an ‘IT-person’. If it’s the former, then the fact that I’ve had perhaps 30 years experience in and around IT might qualify me to criticise? But more to the point, my background is as an explicit cross-discipline generalist – I’m one of the few people formally qualified as such, with an MA in General Studies from London’s Royal College of Art. And it’s in that sense, as a long-experienced practitioner of ‘design-thinking’ within a very wide variety of business contexts, that I see IT-centrism as such a problem. (And, for that matter, business-centrism – which I’ll come back to in a moment.) In terms focus of attention, the single most important fact in enterprise-architecture, or business-architecture, or any other architecture, is this:

Within any architecture, everywhere and nowhere is ‘the centre’, all at the same time.

What happens in any form of ‘-centrism’ is that we keep on being dragged back to some specific area that claims to be ‘The Centre’ of the architecture. Rather than an ‘outside-in’ view – an awareness of the whole – we’re constrained to an ‘inside-out’ view, where everything in the architecture is seen only in relation to and in terms of that single ‘The Centre’. If there is no direct connection to that ‘The Centre’, or no direct impact, whatever-it-is is usually dismissed as ‘out of scope’, and often deemed not even to exist. Hence, in TOGAF’s inherently ‘inside-out’ view – in which IT-infrastructure is its actual ‘The Centre’ – we have no means to describe anything that is not-IT and that does not in some way impact directly on IT.

[To illustrate the point, try using TOGAF or its linked Archimate-notation to describe the physical activity of a production-line, the trucks and conveyor belts and other machines of physical logistics, the human activity of paper-based record-keeping, or the physical infrastructure - cooling, power-supplies and suchlike - of an IT data-centre: if you can do it all, you'll have to use some horrible kludges and fudged reframings of the supposed standards in order to do it... And yet all of these things would be essential in an enterprise-architecture for the respective industry.]

I need to reiterate that it isn’t only IT-centrism that creates this kind of problem: it’s any-centrism. What I’ve also been seeing recently is a lot more ‘business-centrism’ in enterprise-architectures, where ‘the business of the business’ is taken to be ‘The Centre’ of the enterprise-architecture. We see this, for example, in the insistence that financial metrics are the only metrics that count, and that return-on-investment (ROI) and the like can only be measured in financial terms – which might be valid within certain subsets of business-architecture, but are way too constrained to be valid in the far broader scope of enterprise-architecture. In some ways this trend worries me even more than IT-centrism, because by the nature of business it will tend to have even more of the wrong kind of credibility, making that much harder to counterbalance and correct within the architecture.

Anyway, Peter Bakker dropped in a useful comment at this point, pointing to a classic early essay by Christopher Alexander, famed author of A Pattern Language:

• pbmobi: @rtolido @tetradian #entarch & #bizarch just see the trees, we need architects who see the semi-lattices http://www.chrisgagern.de/Media/A_City_is_not_a_tree.pdf #ogsfo

• taotwit: @tetradian @rtolido erm.. Tom I think you’re mixing up what EA is with what should be!
• tetradian: @taotwit @rtolido if someone’s defining a new standard, surely it should be about what should be, not about preserving current mistakes?
• taotwit: @tetradian @rtolido good point – I hope they listen to the likes of Alec Sharp and Patrick Hoverstadt

Agreed with Nigel there: a business-architecture certification scheme would need input from people like Alec or Patrick, or likewise from other key figures in business-architecture or business-innovation such as Alex Osterwalder or Steve Blank. But, like me, none of them are members of Open Group – which means that not only do we not have a voice, but what we say will be ignored anyway. In other words, Open Group expressly locks out many of the people who are doing real innovation in business-architecture, and then wonders why there are real doubts about the usefulness or validity of what it then produces as its ‘standard’.

Which brings us to the disaster-area of certification. In principle it’s a good idea, even a very necessary idea: every profession needs some way to identify and validate core knowledge and the like. But when the certification for a discipline is managed by a group that evidently do not understand what that core-knowledge actually needs to be, then we have a problem… and that’s exactly what we have with Open Group and business-architecture.

Open Group are an IT-standards body: and they’re very, very good at what they do in IT. But they’re not a general business-standards body – and that fact is becoming extremely important here. In the days when TOGAF was solely about IT-architecture – as it was up until version 7 – then it made sense for the ‘enterprise IT-architecture’ standard to be maintained by the Open Group. But the problem with any enterprise-scope architecture is that, by definition, you have to take everything in the enterprise into account: hence an expansion out into data- and applications-architectures in TOGAF 8, and then, in TOGAF 8.1 ‘Enterprise Edition’, the addition of a loosely-defined ‘anything not-IT that might affect IT’. Unfortunately they made two fundamental errors at that point: because that random bundle represented IT’s view of what it called ‘the business’, they labelled it ‘Business Architecture’; and they then described the whole IT-specific structure as ‘Enterprise Architecture’ – both of which sort-of made sense from their own inside-out perspective, but made no sense to anyone else, especially when looking outside-in. Oops…

Anyway, back to certification. So first, there is a real value in having a common language for specific types of architecture. In that sense, the TOGAF 9 ‘Foundation’ certification is genuinely useful, because it tests knowledge of that common language.

Likewise the practitioner-certifications such as ITAC, which assess someone’s practical skills and competence. Unfortunately it’s no use to me, though, as it still assumes that the only possible path to enterprise-architecture is via detail-level IT-infrastructure architecture, which I don’t do and never have. (I’ve done a lot of mainstream data-architecture in my time, but that doesn’t towards ITAC certification either.)

But to my mind – and in my experience, too – the mid-level certification, ‘TOGAF Certified’, is actually worse than useless: to be blunt, it’s almost a measure of how much someone is not competent to do enterprise-architecture. Yikes… there are some serious problems there…

That perhaps sounds a bit harsh: it’s not. There are two interlinked reasons why this is so.

The first is that ‘TOGAF Certified’ is a content-based exam. All it tests is how well people know the TOGAF specification – not architecture-practice. And to be blunt, the TOGAF specification is a long way from what’s needed to do enterprise-architecture – especially in any industry other than ‘the usual suspects’ of banking, finance, insurance, tax. (Why those industries? Because their business-models are built almost entirely around large volumes of simple structured information with automatable business-processes – in other words, strongly IT-oriented. Which doesn’t apply to most other industries.) I almost failed my TOGAF 8.1 exam because I answered several questions in terms of what I knew worked in practice, rather than what’s written in the book. And the ‘correct’ answer in the book was just plain wrong: I knew from real-world practice that it was exactly what not to do. Needless to say, I wasn’t impressed when I was penalised in the exam for doing it right…

The second reason is that TOGAF is not a standard. This isn’t some arbitrarily-unkind assertion that I’m making: it’s not only common knowledge, but I’ve even heard several senior Open Group figures say so in public. (Exact quote: “Of course no-one uses TOGAF out of the box! – we always have to customise it one way or another”.) The best way to describe TOGAF is that it’s a somewhat-better-than-random cookbook of ideas and practices vaguely held together by a almost equally-vague structure of the Architecture Development Method [ADM] – and that’s it. There’s not much guidance in TOGAF itself on how to customise TOGAF: you get that from experience, with a bit of help from some of the better training-providers.

So what we have at present in the ‘TOGAF Certified’ exam is a way-too-simplistic multiple-choice test on the supposed content of a ‘standard’ that actually isn’t a standard and often doesn’t match up at all well with real-world practice anyway. So just how much use do you think that’s going to be? To anyone? Honestly? Hmm…

And given that, how much credence would you place on a certification-scheme by the same people on a domain which they demonstrably don’t understand much if at all, judging by the current content of TOGAF’s ‘Phase B: Business Architecture’? Oops…

Hence why I’m extremely wary of letting this current attempt by Open Group go unchallenged: they really are almost the least-appropriate group to do the job.

No question at all that we do need some very good work to happen on business-architecture, and urgently so. But please, not from Open Group? – at the very least, not until they’ve tidied up the utter shambles of ‘Business Architecture’ in the current TOGAF, and can demonstrate that that they can keep their reflex IT-centrism under better control than at present?

Sigh… Oh well… back to the grindstone, I guess…

Over to you for comment or whatever, anyway.

Once again, many thanks indeed to all those who Tweeted, to help us all get a better picture of the current Open Group view of enterprise-architectures.

Same minor edits as in the previous posts:, I’ve stripped out most of the ‘#ogSFO’ hashtags in the text, and added occasional comments of my own in italics, but otherwise the following is as Tweeted by the respective participants.

I’ve also added a few wrap-up remarks of my own at the end.

As usual, somewhat less volume again on this day of the conference, but still several pages’-worth, so continue after the break.

—

Jason Bloomberg:

• theopengroup: Kicking off day three with @Zapthink President, Jason Bloomberg, on Architecting the #Cloudhttp://t.co/kOjRl41x
• systemsflow: Cant drop an app into the cloud & expect cloud advantages; adjust the app to take advantage elasticity/high avail (Bloomberg) #cloud
• systemsflow: Bloomberg identifying real #cloud issues: inconsistent data, state tolerance, application readiness.
• TerryBlevins: Finally someone talking about transaction integrity! Great talk from Jason Bloomberg!
• ArtBourbon: Important talk by Jason Bloomberg of @Zapthink on REST as architecture not tech and why (and when) it’s right for #Cloud.
• theopengroup: “You need to start with your business problem when architecting the #cloud. Then you know what’s right for you.” @TheEbizWizard

Henry Franken:

• theopengroup:: But can’t miss Henry Franken from @BIZZdesign discuss #ArchiMate http://t.co/wEI4nfCt
• brendabizz: BiZZdesign CEO Henry Franken presenting #ogSFO re: ArchiMate 2.0 ,  an effective way to communicate w stakeholders

William Sheleg:

• nadsmat2diworld: A capability is the ability to reliably and consistently deliver a specified outcome – William Sheleg -Deloitte #entarch

Bob Weisman:

• systemsflow: Weisman talking about being parachuted into troubled areas to assist #EntArch // Note to self: ask for parachute next time.
• systemsflow: “As-Is” architecture views can be powerful tool to communicate how bad thngs really are.  (Weisman) // “As-Was” sells #EntArch value.
• systemsflow: A large project executing without an overarching architecture context defines its own context. (Weisman) #EntArch // Tail wags dog.
• EricStephens: doesn’t have to be called #entarch to be #entarch (Weismann)
• EricStephens: essential to have cross domain #entarch board (Weisman)
• nadsmat2diworld: EA is a planning and investment methodology not IT/IM. -Robert Weissman – Build The Vision #entarch

Dario Vargas:

• brendabizz: BiZZdesign partner Dario Vargas of Unycorp from Mexico about to present on #Archimate at #ogSFO
• theopengroup: Listening to Dario Vargas of Unycorp, Mexico on #ArchiMate. http://t.co/kuM5iScq

David Gilmour:

• theopengroup: David Gilmour giving his presentation “Architecting for Information Security in a Cloud Environment”
• systemsflow: When targeting the #cloud, Make sure you design your system and your system’s security to be testable (Gilmore)
• ArtBourbon: David Gilmour on a smart way of classifying data by nature and use for #Cloud #Security

Chris Lockhart:

• chrisonea: I’m on after a guy talking about “cloud distance” and “continuing fractions.” How do I top that?
• EricStephens: Not a case study, a story @chrisonea
• chrisonea: Don’t let your #CIO and #CTO go off by themselves to devise a business transformation plan. Don’t other CxO’s have input? #entarch
• EricStephens: Clouds often imply there is a storm coming.
• chrisonea: RT @EricStephens: Not a case study, a story @chrisonea < It’s not a party it’s an intimate get-together! #phineasandferb
• chrisonea: Innovation: The creation and use of better or MORE EFFECTIVE products, processes, services. Not necessarily brand new ideas
• chrisonea: I figured if no one was going to RT bits from my preso, I’d do it myself as I speak. I’m tweeting with my MIND! #entarch #cio
• chrisonea: Biz Transformation doesn’t mean we have to throw everything out and start again. We have skills, we have talent. Let’s leverage that
• chrisonea: If at your Org “Let’s build a technology enabled service platform!” really means “Let’s go buy a tool!” you might have a problem
• chrisonea: Yes I’m tweeting as I speak to this packed room. No hands! Hey you in the blue shirt at that back table! Pay attention!
• chrisonea: If you don’t set expectations with the business, don’t be surprised when they turn on your entire IT org because you “didn’t deliver”
• chrisonea: You are NOT your frameworks! #unarchitecture #entarch >yes! – well put, Chris! (frameworks are useful, though… )
• chrisonea: The Greatest IT Problem is People. People with expectations. #entarch #itarch >…and the Greatest Entarch Problem is ‘IT-People’ with fixed assumptions…
• chrisonea: Always be asking “What business problem are we trying to solve here?” Sort of like “Always be closing” but different #entarch #itarch
• chrisonea: If you don’t understand your cost of goods sold, how will you ever know you’re going to make money with project xyz? #entarch
• theopengroup: “Leave architectural purity in the ivory tower.” @chrisonea #entarch
• chrisonea: People and their expectations: Co-Opt them! Make them think your idea was really their own! Works every time. #entarch
• Laura_J_M_L: @chrisonea you topped the previous guy very well. Liked your presentation!
• chrisonea: To do UnArchitecture, recognize the limitations! Be practical! Reuse where it makes sense! Also remember, it’s about people! #entarch
• NadhanAtHP: @chrisonea: Different people — IT or Not — have different expectations — especially in the Cloud http://bit.ly/pqE4Jq #HP
• EricStephens: @ChrisOnEA thinks, therefore he tweets
• chrisonea: Yes I am wearing a T Shirt with the autobot logo on it. Hey, I classed it up with a sportcoat! Cmon!
• EricStephens: @chrisonea such a hipster

Some assorted miscellanea:

• TerryBlevins: #ogSFO: G8 conference! Dealing with the real hard problems that if addressed will advance the integrity of the IT industry as a whole!
• nadsmat2diworld: Made my first purchase using Square today. App lets you use #iPhone or #iPad as a merchant terminal. Very cool. #entarch
• NadhanAtHP: If u r #ogsfo, visit the Winchester House to see how not to architect your enterprise. // If u r at the Winchester House, go to #ogsfo to see how to architect your enterprise http://t.co/kINCQBdA @NadhanAtHP #HP @theopengroup
• theopengroup: .@NadhanAtHP @chrisonea just referenced the Winchester Mystery House when talking about #entarch #ogSFO
• LaurensGunneweg: TIL about the haunted Winchester mystery castle, where construction proceeded, without interruption, from 1884 until 1922
• nadsmat2diworld: @theopengroup Great conference but proliferation of EA acceptance requires getting more CEOs & execs in room not just IT/architects >yep…
• NadhanAtHP: @theopengroup Top 5 tenets of EA that impact App Development #HP @NadhanAtHP http://bit.ly/oKnAhi

Jeff Scott:

• nickmalik: Jeff Scott discussing alignment – excellent #entarch #bizarch
• nickmalik: Brian Cameron points out that Business strategy rarely addresses things that are difficult to change like architecture #entarch
• chrisonea: When in doubt, always turn to #Gartner.   #entarch #cio
• nickmalik: Jeff Scott: Business architecture insight – focuses on what rather than how, but we must start with WHY #bizarch #entarch
• nickmalik: Too Early to standardize on business arch because we are immature.  We don’t have all the pieces yet, says Jeff Scott #Bizarch
• DaveBBradshaw: “If your #entarch doesn’t resonate with the business folks it’s wrong” (Scott)
• chrisonea: RT @chrisonea: When in doubt, always turn to #Gartner.   #entarch #cio < This was mostly a joke. Tone, twitter, TONE!
• DaveBBradshaw: Jeff Scott is talking about using value mapping to focus IT on what the business is focused on
• DaveBBradshaw: Use capability mapping to drive IT investment in the projects.  #entarch

Stephen Bennett:

• EricStephens: Now listening to @stephengbennett speak about a pragmatic approach to #cloud computing
• EricStephens: Iteration is important with any #cloud approach @stephengbennett
• jfbauer: @EricStephens Iteration is important with any #cloud approach<JB:good for all major new tech deployment not just #cloud
• EricStephens: #cloud: are you (or your clients) Dilbert ($$) or Neo (agility, competitive)? @stephengbennett
• chrisonea: RT @EricStephens: Clouds often imply there is a storm coming. < Or a train. Coming round the bend.
• EricStephens: Nice structured approach to driving a #cloud strategy using a variety of analysis tools @stephengbennett

E.G. Nadhan:

• NadhanAtHP: @NadhanAtHP says Enterprise Architects must drive Innovation @theopengroup #HP http://bit.ly/vRxQgv
• NadhanAtHP: @NadhanAtHP says IaaS standards take time to evolve — SOCCI is a welcome exception @theopengroup #HP #HPCloudCA #CloudComputing

Pradipa Karbhari:

• theopengroup: Getting insight from Sogeti on using #TOGAF in Enterprise Architecture for the Energy Services industry
• theopengroup: #TOGAF gives you a pathway for developing a total architecture by Sogeti’s Pradipa Karbhari
• theopengroup: #TOGAF doesn’t limit what you do as an architect says Sogeti’s Pradipa Karbhari >uh… yes, it does – unless you use TOGAF quite a long way from the TOGAF spec…

Dan Hughes:

• systemsflow: @systemsflow’s own Dan Hughes is presenting Investigative Architecture: Understanding Systems in a Business Context @theopengroup.

Penelope Gordon:

• mskilton: Selecting  business performance metrics for Cloud OEMs by Penelope Gordon #cloud
• mskilton: Selecting cloud metrics need to support your cloud monetization strategy @capgeminiUK #cloud
• mskilton: There are 3 key types of cloud monetization strategies, Ops, growth, Ts&Cs, say P Gordon #cloud @capgeminiUK
• mskilton: Cloud Monetization strategies need to drive your Value Proposition, Say P Gordon, #cloud @capgeminiUK
• mskilton: Selecting the right metrics that match your cloud monetization strategy is critical , say P Gordon, #cloud @capgeminiUK
• mskilton: Investor expectations affect margin and risk profile that your cloud value proposition must align and achieve , say P Gordon #cloud
• mskilton: Open Group CBA Project P Gorden and @mskilton in Cloud Work Grp are developing  Cloud Business Metrics guidance #cloud @capgeminiUK
• mskilton: salesforce.com SaaS casestudy illustrates cheaper faster cloud value propositions, say P Gordon #cloud
• mskilton: salesforce.com PaaS casestudy illustrates better faster cloud value propositions, say P Gordon #cloud
• mskilton: monetization strategy value proposition is basis for enduring value , say P Gordon #cloud @capgeminiUK
• theopengroup: RT @mskilton: cautionary tale metrics can change over time for IaaS + managed business apps  not amortizing costs, – P Gordon  #cloud @capgeminiUK

Panel on cloud-interoperability:

• theopengroup: @mskilton @capgeminiUK looking forward to your talk on #Cloud Interoperability this afternoon at #ogSFO
• theopengroup: Listening to a dynamic trio from #Capgemini, #Cisco,and @HP on #Cloud portability and #interoperability http://t.co/GqIBGaH3
• mskilton: Cloud Interoperability Panel at starting at #ogsfo  #cloud @capgeminiUK
• mskilton: pre condition for cloud growth is to reuse cloud components – cloud IOP Panel #cloud
• mskilton: alot of cloud IOP is focus on virtual to virtual IOP not between cloud and traditional IT – cloud panel #cloud
• mskilton: need to keep in mind traditional legacy standards as well a new standards -  cloud panel #cloud
• mskilton: need to look at real problems in cloud IOP – cloud panel #cloud
• mskilton: most challenging missing piece in cloud ioP is semantics ontology and consistent naming standards – cloud panel #cloud
• mskilton: cloud has the hight barrier and over expectation on what cloud can deliver- my be a barrier to its success #cloud
• theopengroup: Is the hype around #Cloud Computing creating a barrier to its success? #cloud panel
• mskilton: need for standards for service discovery and standard SLA  terms – cloud panel #cloud @capgeminiUK
• mskilton: There are some issues around ID security is just one part of the picture, ID, Access , Use  all need to be joined- cloud panel #cloud
• mskilton: top down Cloud IOP solutions re too difficult to implement, bottom up is a better way to go – cloud panel  #cloud
• NadhanAtHP: @theopengroup #cloud panel – Forces and counter forces to #CloudComputing adoption and success http://t.co/LovysX23 #HPCloudCA
• Marc_Carno: “@mskilton: challenging missing piece in cloud ioP is semantics ontology&consistent naming standards – #cloud” mouthful but good
• mskilton: need to consider different workload types have different behaviors that IOP needs to recognize – cloud panel #cloud @capgeminiUK
• mskilton: keep it simple -complexity os a big barrier in IOP #cloud @capgeminiUK
• mskilton: We are going toward kinds of brokers in the future of cloud – cloud panel #cloud @CapgeminiUK
• mskilton: I may not see IOP in my lifetime but I sure hope it happens #cloud @CapgeminiUK
• mskilton: IOP needs to solve the business needs now . Needs to be requirement driven – cloud panel #cloud @CapgeminiUK
• NadhanAtHP: SOA principles evolved to define the Cloud paradigm – hence SOCCI.  #cloudcomputing #HPCloudCA @theopengroup http://t.co/c8oxxdC4

Roberto Severo:

• ArtBourbon: “Every company has an accidental EA – even if they don’t realize it” @rsevero at #ogSFO

A few more miscellanea:

• EricStephens: Recent talk I gave at @theopengroup conference in San Francisco on EA Governance @OTNArchBeat  http://t.co/Fih1n91h
• ArtBourbon: Nice to meet up with @rsevero and @chrisonea at #ogSFO – new people to learn from
• chrisonea: OK. I’ve had enough #cloud speak. Time to drink.
• EricStephens: Pleasure seeing so many folks at #ogsfo including tweeps @mikejwalker, @selse and @chrisonea. Safe travels to all.

A handful of notes on the free (in both senses) section of the conference, the ‘TOGAF Camp’:

• stevenunn: Interest in building blocks and ArchiMate at TOGAF(R) Camp #entarch
• stevenunn: TOGAF(R) Camp favorite topic is “Applying TOGAF in an immature IT environment, and forcing its rapid adoption” #entarch
• togaf_r: TOGAF Camp: Good interactions on ArchiMate, TOGAF implementation and certification
• togaf_r: For those attending TOGAF Camp. The white papers referenced were Y121, W102 and W103 at http://t.co/Ef5qYiOK

And a couple of wrap-up items:

• a_josey: Day 3 completed with TOGAF Camp and Cloud Camp (@ The Open Group Conference San Francisco #ogsfo) http://t.co/PrWAPjmQ
• theopengroup:: Thank you to all the engaging participants in the conference for another wonderful year! http://t.co/oN2RYA34

—

Okay, now it’s my turn.

For the first time in almost year, this is one Open Group conference where I’m disappointed that I wasn’t able to go. (Okay, part of that was that there are lot of other people in the San Francisco region that I need to meet up with, but the conference would have been a great excuse to do so. )

Despite the usual IT-obsessions – such as the huge hype over cloud-computing at present – there do seem to be some genuine of signs of movement away from the IT-centrism of the past. Quite a few presentations clearly indicated a need to think much wider than just IT, and some even acknowledged the need to explore beyond the organisation itself – which is a definite improvement on past years. (Yes, I’m well aware that Open Group is an IT-standards body, and therefore would tend to have a natural bias towards IT: but if it’s going to insist on working in enterprise-architecture, it does need to take the whole enterprise into account…)

The new version 2.0 of Archimate had its expected mix of satisfaction and disappointment:

– The satisfying part is that a couple of very important gaps in its coverage have now been filled, with the addition of Location and the broader-reach Motivation extension (though how anyone could describe motivation as an ‘extension’ when it should be the core of any architecture-notation is another matter entirely…). The Migration extension will be very useful indeed, not least as a workaround for the fact that so few existing EA toolsets have any usable means to cope with architecture-change.

– The disappointment is that there are still no entities to describe the physical-world – physical-infrastructure, machines, vehicles or anything of that kind – so it’s still all but impossible to use Archimate to model anything much beyond IT. For example, we can’t model the relationship between physical logistics and the accompanying information; we can’t even model the whole architecture of a data-centre, because we have no way to describe power-supplies or cooling-systems and the like. And although it’s obviously unlikely to change by now, the fundamentally-wrong IT-centric layering of Archimate (‘Business’, ‘Application’ and ‘[IT] Infrastructure’) still scrambles everything whenever we try to do a proper service-oriented architecture that does not assume that everything not-IT is ‘business’. Oh well: next time, perhaps?

Anyway, clearly a good conference – and I hope these collated Tweets have been of use to you? Let me know, perhaps?

Once again, many thanks indeed to all those who Tweeted, to help us all get a better picture of the current Open Group view of enterprise-architectures.

As before, I’ve stripped out most of the ‘#ogSFO’ hashtags in the text, and added occasional comments of my own in italics, but otherwise the following is as Tweeted by the respective participants.

Not quite so much as the previous day, but still a lot, so continue after the break.

—

A few miscellaneous items before the start:

• a_josey: Day 2 coming up, starts with announcement of ArchiMate 2.0  release (@ The Open Group Conference San Francisco) http://4sq.com/y2kgb6
• Dana_Gardner: Mark Mills and Julio Ottino: The Coming Tech-led Boom – http://WSJ.com http://on.wsj.com/xCgUrO
• Dana_Gardner: Amazon S3 Reports Staggering Growth in 2011 – ReadWriteCloud http://rww.to/zglQJT DG<No data in the cloud?
• theopengroup: T-10 minutes before Allen Brown @theopengroup addresses attendees for another invigorating day at #ogSFO! http://t.co/qtFBcvRM

Launch of Archimate version 2.0:

• ArchiMate_r: New for ArchiMate 2: The Open Group launches ArchiMate certification program http://t.co/76McCnro
• ArchiMate_r: The ArchiMate 2.0 Specification is now available to download http://t.co/jIAZXtRd
• ArchiMate_r: New White Paper: An Introduction to ArchiMate 2.0 now available for free download http://t.co/jFYoF0p3
• Dana_Gardner: Allen Brown, President and CEO of The Open Group, announced arrival of ArchiMate 2.0. More here: http://t.co/fYiJiFsq #entarch
• EricStephens: ArchiMate 2.0 -> Intro: http://t.co/S3Am6vMc / Spec: http://t.co/LL9OTDfY / Launch: http://t.co/RKUnAfY5 #entarch
• brendabizz: Allen Brown CEO OpenGroup announces ArchiMate 2.0, an intuitive language that empowers architects to communicate well w stakeholders
• brendabizz: BiZZdesign 1 of the sponsors to assist in creating the exams & certification program for ArchiMate 2.0. 4 info b.cowie@bizzdesign.com
• ArchiMate_r: Slide deck: An introduction to ArchiMate 2.0 People Certification now available (pdf) http://ow.ly/8MAVN
• ArchiMate_r: ArchiMate 2.0 Resources: Download the ArchiSurance Case Study http://ow.ly/8Myty
• ArchiMate_r: ArchiMate 2.0 Resources: Download the Spec, Reference Cards, White paper and more http://ow.ly/8Myfm
• ArchiMate_r: Slide deck: An Introduction to ArchiMate 2.0 now available (pdf)  http://ow.ly/8HtRd
• ArchiMate_r: ArchiMate 2.0 Resource:  Visio Stencils Set available http://ow.ly/8N5GV
• ArchiMate_r: Read ArchiMate 2.0 online at http://ow.ly/8NtE8

Another technical standard from Open Group:

• NadhanAtHP: First Technical Standard for Cloud Computing released – Service Oriented Cloud Computing Infrastructure http://bit.ly/y0CGlz

General report (‘State of the Union’, perhaps? ) from Open Group’s Allen Brown:

• EricStephens: Allen Brown: we’re all involved in transformation in one form or another
• systemsflow: Enterprise transformation is a journey, not an event.  #entarch
• EricStephens: EAs starting to work with many more roles within the enterprise, not just IT
• chrisonea: RT @EricStephens: EAs starting to work with many more roles within the enterprise, not just IT < thank goodness! >yes!
• EricStephens: Certification on the rise for @opengroup related topics (TOGAF, ArchiMate).
• Dana_Gardner: TOGAF 9 certification rates growing rapidly worldwide, says Open Group’s Brown #entarch
• togaf_r: Allen Brown: TOGAF certification a foundation, a common language. Over 11,000 certified individuals
• IverPDX: Everyone is involved in enterprise transformation in some way; there are no magic moments — Open Group CEO Allen Brown #entarch
• mcrugo: A. Brown of TOG. Case study suggests Architecture must address the whole of a business problem, not just part of it. >yes! – about time! – but can TOG actually support this? – possibly not…
• theopengroup: Open Group FACE Consortium looking to transform the #avionics industry with open standards
• Technodad: Allen Brown discusses role of FACE in Defense transformation at #ogsfo [pic]: http://t.co/Ib3sas08
• EricStephens: Allen Brown: (my interpretation) EA and EAs need to look at entire (wicked?) problem, not just the IT parts >yes!
• EricStephens: Allen Brown: Org Design helpful in addressing enterprise change
• Dana_Gardner: Allen Brown detailing compelling case studies of large global enterprises that have leveraged enterprise architecture well #entarch
• theopengroup: Day 2 is underway! http://twitter.com/theopengroup/status/164397354705891328/photo/1
• EricStephens: Brown: Enterprises need vision linked to desired capabilities, but not necessarily a complete one.
• systemsflow: Theme of @theopengroup #EntArch case studies is to focus on business, not just technology!
• theopengroup: #EntArch doesn’t transform a business, it’s part of the solution >oops… wicked-problems such as EA don’t have ‘solutions’, it’s a continuing ‘re-solution’
• Dana_Gardner: More than 400 corporations are now members of The Open Group over past 12 years, says Brown #entarch

Keynote from William ‘Bill’ Rouse:

• theopengroup: The first speaker this morning is Georgia Tech’s William Rouse. Listening to his POV on #Enterprise Transformation…
• Dana_Gardner: Bill Rouse, executive director, Tennenbaum Institute at Georgia Tech, now up at The Open Group conference #entarch
• Dana_Gardner: Rouse: In 25 years, 1000 companies left Fortune 500 — showing enterprise transformation has high failure rate http://bit.ly/wAHhkg
• theopengroup: Roughly 200% of Fortune 500 Companies have turned over in the past 20 years Bill Rouse
• Dana_Gardner: Big hurdle for enterprises is deciding they need to change, they wait too long, says Rouse #entarch
• systemsflow: Value is created by work.  If you are not creating value, you are doing the wrong work or doing it poorly. (W. Rouse) #EntArch
• LaurensGunneweg: William B. Rouse: 1000 organizations have left the fortune 500 in the past 25 years, involuntary. Enterprise transformation is tough.
• EricStephens: Rouse: social networks often the bigger barrier to change rather than technology >yep: hence must be in EA scope!
• Dana_Gardner: A few rare companies can transform the market, rather than transform themselves, like Apple or Walmart, says Rouse #entarch
• theopengroup: Georgia Tech’s Bill Rouse says “you can be the innovator or the transformer” #EntArch
• systemsflow: W. Rouse: Organizations often delay transformation until it is obvious they need to. (aka, Too Late)  #entarch
• nadsmat2diworld: Enterprise Transformation is driven by experienced and/or anticipated value deficiencies…W. Rouse #entarch
• nadsmat2diworld: Wal-Mart didn’t transform. It was the innovator. Sears and K-Mart had to transform. Innovation can be risky. W. Rouse #entarch
• Dana_Gardner: Need to look at full ecosystem a business operates in to effectively transform, says Rouse #entarch >yep: hence must cover scope beyond IT alone!
• EricStephens: ? Enterprise transformation is the what, #entarch is how we get it done?
• EricStephens: Enterprise transformation ~= #designthinking? (term doesn’t matter, but the outcome does)
• systemsflow: W.Rouse presents interesting analysis of health care #EntArch.  Closes with “now let’s talk about IT.” #itsallbusiness
• EricStephens: Rouse: visualization important to exploring and gaining consensus on new ideas
• Dana_Gardner: Architecture-oriented thinking can be transformative in itself, says Rouse #entarch
• EricStephens: Decisions informed by data is profound for many organizations
• jfbauer: @EricStephens Decisions informed by data is profound for many organizations<JB:sad but very true
• Dana_Gardner: Business ecosystems are co-creatig high-value services, expanding transformation across supply chains, says Rouse #entarch
• mcrugo: Bill Rouse suggests data driven decision making is transformative in and of itself.
• Dana_Gardner: Using analytics better to support evidence-based decision making is transformative, says Rouse #entarch
• systemsflow: Without evidence based decision making and a defined decision making process, decisions are based on personal preference.  #EntArch
• systemsflow: W. Rouse: Without analytics AND visualizations, management buy-in not likely. (In-your-face, evidence-based data) #entarch
• mikejwalker: W. Rouse: published competencies for Enterprise Transformation #entarch #cio
• KrishnaswamyS: a. Business Vision and b. Strategy, critical for Enterprise Transformation – BillRouse #entarch

Keynote from Tim Barnes:

• Dana_Gardner: Next up at Open Group conference, Tim Barnes, Chief Architect, Devon Energy #entarch
• theopengroup:: Devon Energy offers a viewpoint on #EntArch, presented by Tim Barnes http://ow.ly/8LoJr
• Dana_Gardner: Devon had 26 M&As, so had huge IT rationalization project, ended up savings $21 million in IT costs, says Barnes #entarch
• EricStephens: Barnes “org” chart emphasizes…capabilities of the #entarch practice. Very nice.
• Dana_Gardner: Devon using TOGAF to improve its architecture methodology, says Barnes #entarch
• systemsflow: T.Barnes: Devon Energy using architecture as a continuous process that continually improves upon itself. #entarch
• Dana_Gardner: EA has become formal part of the corporate annual strategy planning at Devon, says Barnes #entarch
• EricStephens: Barnes: Sign of adoption success – execs have the architecture models on their walls w/o #entarch in the room
• systemsflow: Social Networking approach to idea submission at Devon Energy builds an environment of innovation in #entarch.
• EricStephens: Barnes: Devon leveraging crowdsourcing & innovation with #entarch to drive outcomes
• Dana_Gardner: Having attained an architectural-level capability, Devon now innovating on common data, mobile device access, says Barnes #entarch
• Dana_Gardner: EA is not easy, but it’s not rocket science either, and produces big positive results, says Barnes #entarch
• Dana_Gardner: Getting as many people as possible to contribute to EA gets them involved in big picture, improves results, says Barnes #entarch
• EricStephens: Barnes: Cross-org collaboration a high-value, soft benefit of their #entarch efforts
• systemsflow: T. Barnes: Getting business and IT to work together makes EA more effective. #entarch
• nadsmat2diworld: The work (“EA”) is not easy but it’s not rocket science. Plan the work and work the plan – Tim Barnes CA- Devon Energy #entarch

Keynote from Joseph Menn:

• Dana_Gardner: Joe Menn, cyber security correspondent for Financial Times, now on stage at Open Group conference http://zd.net/yn32N7
• theopengroup: .@josephmenn delivering his presentation “What You’re Up Against: Mobsters, Nation-States and Blurry Lines” http://bit.ly/wB81na
• EricStephens: @josephmeen indicates foreign cyber-threats are a big deal. #understatement
• Dana_Gardner: Anonymous is among most interesting things in cyber security landscape, says Menn #entarch
• systemsflow: Unique take away from Joseph Menn’s security talk.  If you get invited to go boar hunting in Russia at night… don’t!
• EricStephens: @systemsflow truth stranger than fiction…
• EricStephens: Two kinds of companies – those who have been hacked and those who don’t know it yet @josephmeen
• theopengroup: Cyber security Threat: Organized crime under government protection due to strategic interest @josephmenn
• Dana_Gardner: More taxpayer money will be needed for effective defenses against cyber attacks, says Menn #entarch
• Dana_Gardner: “It’s in no one’s interest to tell us how bad it really is” when it comes to cyber crime and security, says Menn #entarch
• theopengroup: Sitting tight for keynote by renown #cyber security journalist @JosephMenn. What are we up against? http://ow.ly/8LoMZ
• Dana_Gardner: Counter attacks may be a strong defense when it comes to cyber risks, and US government may “turn blind eye”, says Menn #entarch
• Dana_Gardner: We may even see cyber crime bounty hunters that corporations hire on the QT to go after those that attack them, says Menn #entarch
• EricStephens: Link to @josephmenn book “Fatal System Error” http://amzn.to/zeyOyK
• Dana_Gardner: Stuxnet http://bit.ly/xz5Jw2 is huge as a harbinger of things to come, says Menn #entarch
• Dana_Gardner: Knowing what you have helps you know when something has been taken, so improve tracking of assets, says Menn #entarch
• Dana_Gardner: Keep your most critical data offline, and protect your IP by burying it in fake data, says Menn #entarch
• whitehatsec: We very much agree RT @Dana_Gardner ‘Knowing what you have helps you know something is taken, improve tracking of assets #entarch’
• mcrugo: @josephmenn delivered a very entertaining  and insightful presentation on the state of cyber security. Nicely done!

Hans Schoebach:

• systemsflow: Hans Schoebach: SOA performed properly (with artifacts) allows for easy reuse of solutions. #entarch #soa
• systemsflow: Hans Schoebach: (Paraphrased) “Reduce risk. Implement in Layers.” Should be a T-Shirt! #entarch #soa

A report on the Open Group’s Security Survey:

• a_josey: Jim Hietala: Security Survey population ~40 respondents

Dr Liu:

• systemsflow: Dr. Liu: Limitation of current info gathering systems for disaster: they don’t leverage private data.  Taxicabs as sensors!

Peter Haviland:

• theopengroup: Exploring the Business Architecture profession and case studies with Peter Haviland @Ernst_and_Young http://ow.ly/8LoQd
• mikejwalker: In Peter Haviland Business Architecture session.
• mcrugo: Peter haviland is discussing business architecture.  His “big picture” analogy, hilarious!
• nickmalik: Peter haviland defines #bizarch value as strategy rigor, alignment, transformation ownership, gov’n enterprise process improve’t
• nickmalik: #bizarch differs from OD and TQM: enterprise level, uses frameworks, uses engineering rigor, says P. Haviland of E&Y
• nickmalik: success factors for #bizarch – leadership invested, success demonstrated, change metrics to support bizarch, delivery engagement
• nickmalik: #bizarch should start with high level capabilities, even though #togaf does not use the term! Says P. Haviland

Someone presenting from BP:

• systemsflow: Reuse what you have and buy what you don’t.  Build from scratch is the last option for BP in filling IT gaps.  http://sfi.cc/bvb
• mikejwalker: BP Business Architecture Session Recap http://bit.ly/wFdqFE #entarch

Heather Kreger:

• theopengroup: IBM’s Heather Kreger offering tips on assessing #SOA maturity with #OSIMM http://ow.ly/8LoVL
• systemsflow: Heather Kreger: OSIMM helps provide a checklist for SOA adoption (who of us doesn’t love a good checklist?)  #soa

Steve Whitlock:

• IverPDX: ConcentratedWealth + UnbalancedRisks + MaliciousActors + ChangeResistance + InsecureInternet = Perfect #Security Storm Steve Whitlock #entarch

Desai:

• systemsflow: Agile EA: Be business driven, forward thinking, quick to deliver value, & identify/repeat best practices. (Desai) #entarch #agile
• systemsflow: Be inclusive with architecture stakeholders.  If they are on your team, they will root for your team! #entarch http://t.co/uK9jiMw8
• EricStephens: Maharshi Desai (Oracle) just completed talk on his EA approach for architecting a Health Information Exchange (HIE/HIX)
• systemsflow: Desai closes with 4 classic images including “Be prepared for the challenge of a biz driven approach.” http://t.co/8z1cSU7x #entarch

A handful of untraced items:

• DaveBBradshaw: In “Using TOGAF to define & govern service oriented architectures”
• DaveBBradshaw: In the “Workshop – The Realization of SOA’s using the SOA Reference Architecture” session
• systemsflow: Whats in #SOA for me? It’s independent, holistic, scalable. Can compare, adapt and evolve. #entarch

Nick Malik:

• systemsflow: “Business agility” means moving faster than your competition. (Malik) #EntArch
• systemsflow: Business agility suffers with reuse.  Solution? Consistency at the core + agility at the edge. (Malik) #EntArch #BizArch
• nadsmat2diworld: “Integrate what we must, not what we can” Nick Malik- Microsoft  on Minimum Sufficient Business Integration (MSBI)  #entarch
• systemsflow: EA Change: Implement in segment.  Bring value.  Socialize and extend.  Repeat. (Malik on EA shampoo) #entarch #bizarch
• systemsflow: Make sound solution choices using a #SOA Reference Architecture. Know your capabilities, constraints and options. #entarch
• systemsflow: Some capabilities create differentiation in the marketplace.  These are the ones that require agility. (Malik) #EntArch #BizArch
• systemsflow: Using terms familiar to your stakeholders helps “land” the model during socialization. (Malik) #entarch #bizarch
• systemsflow: Architects want wall charts. CxO’s want 8.5″x11″ (Malik) #entarch  Target the handout for scope, then print big. http://t.co/RGo5Bn8p
• nickmalik: [post]  “Developing a Core Diagram” using Minimum Sufficient Business Integration method  #bmgen #entarch  http://t.co/dEnpIQIP

Kumar and Arsanjani:

• systemsflow: What elements to include in your #SOA RefArch depends on your SOA maturity level. (Kumar & Arsanjani)  #OSIMM #entarch

Maczuba:

• systemsflow: Lesson #1 of establishing #SOA Governance: Know your org, its vision, its skills, its governance process. (Maczuba) #EntArch
• systemsflow: “The best executed #SOA is when the stakeholders don’t realize they are doing it: Make it seamless.” (Maczuba) #entarch
• systemsflow: Take time to communicate your #SOA Governance framework to your stakeholders. Be transparent. Involve all parties. (Maczuba) #entarch

Laverdure and Conn:

• systemsflow: The business landscape is pervasive, unrelenting, disruptive change, also known as “opportunity.” (Laverdure, Conn) #entarch
• systemsflow: Sustainability is the “live long and prosper” of system qualities.  (Laverdure, Conn) #entarch #startrek
• systemsflow: Laverdure/Conn: Yet another @theopengroup presentation reference to stakeholder inclusion as critical to #EntArch success. #theme

Eric Stephens:

• systemsflow: Stephens: “Neither the importance nor the tedium of EA governance can be overstated”
• systemsflow: Increasing Biz, IT demands. Who can save the day? The Enterprise Architect! Has the competencies and the tools. #superhero #entarch
• systemsflow: 1.2ZB (1.2*10^21 bytes) of data was created in 2010.  Big data migration to the cloud means governance is critical. #entarch
• systemsflow: IT is moving from “expense” to “biz partner” and, eventually, to “no IT” – fully part of business. (Stephens) #entarch #bizborg
• systemsflow: Shadow IT != spiteful/sinister. Biz users bypass IT to “get the job done” as IT becomes more accessible  #saas  #entarch #governance

Mike Walker:

• mikejwalker: My presentation starts in 20 minutes. Come by to see Why EAs Must Drive Cloud Strategy #entarch #cio
• nickmalik: #entarch Mike Walker uses Cranfield Benefits Dependency Network to illustrate business value of #cloud — cool
• nickmalik: Mike Walker using Risk Assessment Framework to identify opportunities to use the #cloud to address enterprise risk #entarch #cio
• mrevoir: @mikejwalker’s presentation at #ogsfo was one of the best. presentation on the #entarch leading the cloud but could be universally leveraged

Mary-Ann Davidson and Don Davidson:

• joshuabrickman: Mary Ann Davidson Oracle Two of the biggest risks are counterfeiting and tainting..the Open Group Trusted Technology Forum addressing
• joshuabrickman: “A  9mm won’t help against a Grizzly Bear”–Mary Ann Davidson talking about Fit for Purpose…there are general limitations of COTS
• joshuabrickman: “Please tell me that ‘Just start coding’ is not your development practice”–Mary Ann Davidson referring to Trusted Technology Forum
• joshuabrickman: “Loss of confidence alone can lead to stakeholder actions that disrupt critical business activities” Don Davidson DOD-CIO  CNCI pres
• joshuabrickman: “Any electronic product that you purchase has a 10% chance that it includes a counterfeit component” Don Davidson DOD-CIO

A few miscellaneous items to finish:

• joshuabrickman: “@ARSzakal: Two days working the Trusted Technology Forum – getting close to a spec.” –But its not easy
• arway_anders: Great statement RT“@mikejwalker: Maybe we need to replace the term of EA with Capability #entarch Jeanne Ross”
• chrisonea: Great meeting @EricStephens for a smoke an a drink tonight. We solved ALL architecture problems.
• EricStephens: “@chrisonea: Great meeting @EricStephens for a smoke an a drink tonight. We solved ALL architecture problems.” | Political problems 2
• NadhanAtHP: 5 tips to make sure your enterprise architecture doesn’t end up looking like the Winchester Mystery House: http://bit.ly/Aj0yOn #HPCI
• Dana_Gardner: Enterprise architects play key role in transformation, say Open Group speakers http://t.co/Zu76seAJ#entarch

—

That’s it for now: more tomorrow (the last day of the conference). Hope it’s been useful, anyway.

Many thanks indeed to all those who Tweeted, to help us all get a better picture of the current Open Group view of enterprise-architectures.

I’ve stripped out most of the ‘#ogSFO’ hashtags in the text, and added occasional comments of my own in italics, but otherwise the following is as Tweeted by the respective participants.

There’s a lot of it, so best place a brief break here.

Miscellaneous before the start:

• nickmalik: @theopengroup attending #ogsfo advanced TOGAF.  Fairly E-IT-A focused.  Good advice for EA pgms inside IT
• Dana_Gardner: Heading over to The Open Group conference in San Francisco. Some great keynote speeches coming this am, we’ll be tweeting on them.
• a_josey: New Open Group blog: FACE Consortium Publishes First Standard for Defense Avionics Systems http://t.co/4vqr4eYY
• marclankhorst: RT @ArchiMate_r: @bizzdesign Please note the date change. The ArchiMate 2.0 launch is on Tuesday Jan 31
• theopengroup: Allen Brown, CEO @theopengroup is taking the stage #ogSFO is officially kicking off! http://t.co/Sl6gD0fy
• Dana_Gardner: CEO Allen Brown kicking off The Open Group conference, FACE and Archimate 2.0 news to come

Keynote by Jeanne Ross:

• Dana_Gardner: MIT’s Jeanne Ross up first http://t.co/wLBREoBs, speaking to a full house at Open Group conference
• Dana_Gardner: Stakes are high for enterprise architecture, needs to show success in the new digital economy, says Ross
• togaf_r: Jeanne Ross: We have to make sure enterprise architecture delivers
• nickmalik: Jeanne Ross keynote – role of the #entarch – To avoid application silos, we need to think in terms of capabilities
• Dana_Gardner: Coming from the siloed past in IT, now moving to business service views on resources, says Ross; now need to juice use of services
• Dana_Gardner: Enterprise architects also now need to help their organizations use services, instill a “value cycle”, says Ross
• systemsflow: “Most companies grossly underuse their capabilities” (Jeane Ross) #entarch
• Dana_Gardner: Enterprise architects need to evangelize use of improved systems after they build them, and show recurring value ASAP, says Ross
• mcrugo: Jeanne Ross from mit explains the move from value chains to value cycles in EA
• systemsflow: Enabling enterprise capabilities only helps if you enable capabilities that the organization will actually use! #entarch
• nickmalik: – J. Ross – Simply “build” the capabilities – not enough – #entarch  start with helping the business exploit current capabilities.
• theopengroup: Listening to MIT’s Jeanne Ross talk Enterprise Transformation at #ogSFO! http://t.co/Sl6gD0fy
• nadsmat2diworld: Listening to @wharton alumna Jeanne Ross at Open Group Conference in San Francisco. “Architecting Business Success” @wharton_women
• stevenunn: Standing room only for Jeanne Ross of MIT Center for Information Systems Research.
• Dana_Gardner: Enterprise architects need to provide “single source of truth” to all business stakeholders, make the information flow well, say Ross
• mcrugo: the different between success and failure in a digital economy is not ate technology, but the people.  Jeanne Ross MIT
• Dana_Gardner: Quality of data, speed of data refresh as top priorities will help enterprise architects rise in performance appreciation, says Ross
• theopengroup: “We live in a digital economy. In order to succeed, organizations need to excel in #entarch” – Jeanne Ross
• Dana_Gardner: “Single source of truth” is at heart of making enterprise architecture valuable going forward, says Ross
• Dana_Gardner: #USAA, as example, created enterprise strategy group aside IT, to organize transformation better (and IT loved it), says Ross
• nickmalik: J. Ross provides a number of stories of companies that provided key value through #entarch – USAA built value by moving EA out of IT
• theopengroup: .@USAA has an Enterprise Strategy & Planning group – partners with IT and sits on the business side working with senior executives
• mcrugo: shorts version of first session: if you build it they will come only works in the movies.
• stevenunn: Jeanne Ross: 5 great case study summaries of corporate EA success – Aetna, Protection 1, USAA, PepsiAmericas & Commonwealth Bank.
• Dana_Gardner: “Customer data is the most important kind of data,” Commonwealth Bank found, relays MIT’s Ross. Works for me. #Scribe
• brendabizz: Listening to Jeanne Ross at #ogSFO  lots of interesting insights, eg: USAA  created value by moving EA out of IT
• nickmalik: Commonwealth Bank saw value in #entarch by focusing on master data mgmt and clean consistent interfaces, from J. Ross
• stevenunn: Jeanne Ross: Commonwealth Bank started by improving access to its data, fixing data issues along the way, rather than in isolation
• Dana_Gardner: Even most successful companies are just learning to do analytics well, and strong operations came first, says Ross.
• stevenunn: Jeanne Ross: Enterprise architects role includes identifying capabilities to be exploited, and building capabilities incrementally
• theopengroup: #Entarch role in business value: Help senior execs clarify biz goals; identify architectural capability that can be readily exploited // Present options and their implications for business goals; build capabilities incrementally #entarch #jeanneross
• systemsflow: Ross:  Trend in 5 case studies.  Companies leverage #entarch to focus first on building great operations then analytic capabilities
• Dana_Gardner: Enterprise architect role: help clarify biz goals, ID what can be done readily, present more options, build incrementally, says Ross
• stevenunn: Jeanne Ross: in response to where do u find gr8 architects? “Mostly by growing them: taking smart people & giving them opportunities”
• nickmalik: J. Ross – good #entarch is grown not made – we need to take smart people and give them opportunities to grow + good education
• brendabizz: At #ogSFO Ross says u must grow talented people:training smart, passionate people,train them and use talented vendor resources
• EAatTRM: Jeanne Ross talk emphasized enterprise architects must help their organizations to exploit what is already there.
• theopengroup: “Some day CIOs will report to the architect – that’s the way it ought to be” #entarch
• mikejwalker: One day the CIO will report to Enteprise Architecture Jeanne Ross #entarch
• nickmalik: J. Ross – best PR for #entarch is a great CIO but EA needs to build good comm skills and focus on business value of capabilities
• mcrugo: talent for EA projects will need to be grown with people with passion, smarts, and drive.  Jeanne Ross MIT q&a
• AvolutionAbacus: Jeanne Ross presenting on one of our client’s journey @Commbank at #ogSFO
• mikejwalker: Maybe we need to replace the term of EA with Capability #entarch Jeanne Ross >sure – as long it’s more than just IT!
• stevenunn: Jeanne Ross: A great CIO is the best PR agency for enterprise architects. BUT, one day the CIO will report to the Chief Architect!
• Dana_Gardner: “Someday CIOs will report to the enterprise architect, because that’s the way it should be,” says MIT’s Ross, to applause
• mcrugo: capabilities cannot be delivered without a clear owner of the end to end process.
• systemsflow: Perception is reality.  If #entarch adds value, but nobody hears it, did the tree fall?
• nickmalik: J. Ross – #entarch must fight for lining up key aspects of ownership and governance to insure adoption of improved capabilities
• stevenunn: Allen Brown, The Open Group CEO: “Enterprise Architects must not only deliver value, but BE SEEN to deliver value”.
• IverPDX: Jeanne Ross of MIT advises enterprise architects to focus first on exploiting existing capabilities before adding new ones #entarch
• pelujan: RT @mikejwalker: One day the CIO will report to Enteprise Architecture #ogsfo Jeanne Ross #entarch | Not a chance. #C’monNowReally
• stevenunn: Jeanne Ross: Avoid strategic divergence by keeping an ongoing dialog with senior management. #entarch #AEA
• stevenunn: Jeanne Ross: “Don’t worry about the tipping point between capability building and exploitation. You’ll know if ur delivering value”
• ArtBourbon: Architects will do more work to identify which capabilities need to be created #entarch Jeanne Ross
• Dana_Gardner: “If you have a lot of money, don’t worry about enterprise architecture,” says MIT’s Ross. #Entarch
• nickmalik: companies with “too much money” have terrible #entarch and business process arch – J. Ross
• theopengroup: “Investment banking is an example of the worst #entarch. Cannot impose discipline if your org has too much money.” #JeanneRoss
• stevenunn: Jeanne Ross: Small organizations still need to focus on their capabilities and how to exploit them
• mikejwalker: Traditional #entarch methods of Plan, Build, Operate are broken. Value Cycles are needed NOT Value Chains #JeanneRoss
• industryleaders: RT @IverPDX: Jeanne Ross of MIT:  EAs add business value by coaching business executives on defining strategy #entarch

Miscellaneous, between keynotes:

• industryleaders: Colombia Mexico Costa Rica in Open Group San Francisco Conference AEA & Dux Diligens
• togaf_r: TOGAF 9 Top 10 certifications by country: 1896 UK|1449 US|1434 NL|900 AUS|678 IN|561 ZA|526 CA|437 FI|381 FR|281 SE
• theopengroup: Where do you find, how do you grow, and how do you keep good EAs? #entarch
• togaf_r: The TOGAF 9.1 document set is now available in the Kindle Store at Amazon
• a_josey: @nadsmat2diworld Presentations will be available in the online proceedings, posted on the wednesday after the conference

Someone else commenting on the persistent IT-centrism in enterprise-architecture:

• Dave_van_Gelder: Why is EA constantly related to IT and CIO’s? >my point exactly, Dave…
• industryleaders: @Dave_van_Gelder It is not only about IT its about a holistic approach its about business strategyand execution >would that that were true for TOGAF…
• Dave_van_Gelder: @industryleaders  I don’t see a holistic approach. Jeanne talked about what IT had to deliver and now it is about an IT transform.
• industryleaders: @Dave_van_Gelder Yes we are agree i am sharing that we must have a satellite vision instead a helicopter one ; )

Keynote by Celso Guiotoko:

• stevenunn: Celso Guiotoko, Corporate VP & CIO, Nissan Motor Co talking on how EA is helping Nissan IT transformation
• industryleaders: Listening Celso Guiotoko, Corporate VP & CIO, Nissan Motor Co talking on how EA is helping Nissan IT transformation
• Dana_Gardner: Business value at top of IT principles for Nissan, information as asset comes next, then reduce complexity, says Guiotoko #entarch
• lmelsted: Nissan’s IT based on BEST: Biz Alignment, Ent Arch, Selective Sourcing, Tech Simplification
• Dana_Gardner: For Guiotoko here’s what works BEST=Business alignment, Enterprise architecture, Selective sourcing, Technology simplification
• nadsmat2diworld: B.E.S.T. Business alignment, Enterprise Architecture, Selective Sourcing, Technological Simplification. Nissan. #entarch
• Dana_Gardner: BEST did this for Nissan: Cost per user went from 1.09 to 0.63 on their metrics scale. Wow. #entarch
• mikejwalker: Using #entarch Nissan reduced cost per user from 1.09 to .63, 230k return, with 404 applications reduced
• systemsflow: Nissan invested $1B in IT Transformation.  Can you think of anything you could fix in your shop with $1B? We’re happy to help.
• stevenunn: Celso Guiotoko, Nissan CIO: Approach to alliance with Renault was to look at each org separately, and then take a view across both
• systemsflow: At #ogsfo hearing many case studies of visionary executives investing in #entarch to great success… and its only hour 2!
• stevenunn: Celso Guiotoko, Nissan CIO: Important to identify relationship between the business and data architectures
• stevenunn: Celso Guiotoko, Nissan CIO: Vitesse program now underway in Nissan: Value Innovation Technology,  Simplification, Service Excellence
• IverPDX: Nissan Motors CIO: Big IS improvements thru BEST program: Bus. alignment, EA, Selective sourcing, Tech simplification #entarch
• stevenunn: Celso Guiotoko, Nissan CIO: IT organization now reports to corporate planning. Very helpful!
• mikejwalker: Nissan’s EA team reports at the executive level within Corporate and Product Managment #entarch
• mcrugo: Nissan and Renault accept the differences in corporate culture as permanent, but it does not stop IT from finding ways to integrate
• stevenunn: Celso Guiotoko, Nissan CIO: important to converge the language if IT dept to that of the business. Using TOGAF(R) helps.

More miscellaneous items:

• Dana_Gardner: The Open Group releases SOA and cloud computing standards, updates OSIMM http://t.co/x4SBjmg2 Recent news #entarch
• nadsmat2diworld: Why is Intercontinental hotel vibrating? #ogSFO #entarch

Keynote by Andy Mulholland:

• theopengroup:: Listening to Capgemini’s Andy Mulholland talk Enterprise Transformation at #ogSFO! http://t.co/Sl6gD0fy
• Dana_Gardner: Up next at Open Group conference: Andy Mulholland, Global Chief Technology Officer & Corporate Vice President at #Capgemini #entarch
• stevenunn: Andy Mulholland, Global CTO, Capgemini starts his talk on “The Transformed Enterprise” #entarch
• Dana_Gardner: Capgemini’s Mulholland http://t.co/TNY6t0ct begins preso on “the transformed enterprise” and look at #cloud trends. #entarch
• Dana_Gardner: Corporations are purely metrics driven, and IT must advance to that reality, says Mulholland #entarch >sorry, but that’s just plain stupid, even if it is true…
• lmelsted: Capgemini’s CTO Andy Mulholland now talking about enterprise transformation at #ogsfo
• Dana_Gardner: Behaviors of workers and customers are causing huge change in markets, with 40M tablets and 70M smartphones, says Mulholland #entarch
• stevenunn: Andy Mulholland, Global CTO, Capgemini: Enterprise IT transformation has been driven by people as workers and as customers
• Dana_Gardner: Bring Your Own Device #BYOD also forcing change; Gartner says 35% of IT budgets going “outside” IT, says Mulholland #entarch
• systemsflow: Home IT is becoming pervasive and challenging the enterprise IT model.
• stevenunn: Andy Mulholland, Global CTO, Capgemini: Gartner predicts that up to 35% of IT expenditure will not be controlled by corporate IT
• Dana_Gardner: Two IT environs developing now inside enterprises: “Inside” IT and “outside” IT, i.e. #cloud, says Mulholland #entarch
• Dana_Gardner: Going “outside” IT not necessarily bad if it’s managed properly, says Mulholland #entarc
• stevenunn: Andy Mulholland, Global CTO, Capgemini: A transformed enterprise uses an external business model. Not a bad thing, if it’s controlled
• Cybersal: Saw Andy Mulholland’s Transformed Enterprise talk at British Computer Society 2 weeks ago – very thought-provoking #entarch
• systemsflow: The transformed enterprise will have two cooperating IT models – back office/traditional and front office/loosely coupled web.
• lmelsted: Back office revolutions drive enterprise change–ignore at your own peril says Capgemini’s Andy Mulholland >yep…
• Dana_Gardner: Business model innovation is new game because these are changing more rapidly, more dramatically, says Mulholland #entarch
• IverPDX: Cap Gemini CTO Mulholland: A transformed organization uses an external business model #entarch #bmgen
• nickmalik: Recommendation – “Seizing the Whitespace” by Johnson – for business model innovation #entarch #bmgen
• stevenunn: Andy Mulholland, Global CTO, Capgemini: There’s a huge revolution occurring in enterprise IT. We must heed the lessons of the 80s/PCs
• Dana_Gardner: To innovate on business models, also need to change how you communicate and use information (Conway’s Law), says Mulholland #entarch
• IverPDX: Three ways to innovate: product, service or cost #entarch >only three???
• theopengroup: Conway’s Law – Enterprises cannot change beyond the constraints of their communications #entarch #andymulholland
• Dana_Gardner: Social networks work better in fast environs to share knowledge efficiently than email, as example, says Mulholland #entarch
• Dana_Gardner: #Cloud-based business processes uniquely allow for real-time adjustments and optimization, which is huge, says Mulholland #entarch
• Dana_Gardner: #Cloud plus #Mobile plus #BigData plus #social is the elixir to business transformation, says Mulholland #entarch
• stevenunn: Andy Mulholland, Capgemini: Interesting cloud example: servicing aircraft – changed where & how we use technology #cloud #entarch
• theopengroup: #cloud, #mobility and #bigdata – 3 core technology clusters and standards, but no business process standards #andymulholland
• mikejwalker: IT is Inside Out focused, looking at the problems within the company only wheras the business looks at problems Outside In. #entarch >yep… that’s the core problem with most current ‘enterprise’-architecture…
• mikejwalker: @Dana_Gardner: #Cloud + #Mobile + #BigData + #social elixir to business transformation #entarch <- Looks like the Gartner Nexus Model
• systemsflow: Enable real time flexibility in front office operations using cloud services, device mobility, and “big data.”  Mulholland.
• stevenunn: Andy Mulholland, Global CTO, Capgemini: it’s not just a revolution in technology, but in working practices too
• Dana_Gardner: #Cloud is really the 4th generation of the Web, says Mulholland #entarch
• IverPDX: Cap Gemini CTO Mulholland:  Services platforms broker in real time the services enabled by back-office IT #entarch
• Dana_Gardner: Transformed enterprise focuses on productivity of people and innovative business models; spells big change for IT, says Mulholland
• Dana_Gardner: IT faces “huge re-integration project” to bring together the inside and outside services in a rational way, says Mulholland #entarch
• stevenunn: Andy Mulholland, Global CTO, Capgemini: the business wants something radically different – don’t try to stop them! #entarch #AEA
• mikejwalker: TOGAF EA Methods has to accept anew model  of traditional Inside Out to a TOGAF complemented by a Outside In model #entarch #TOGAF >yes yes YES!!!
• Dana_Gardner: Governance models are the key to re-integration required of inside and outside services, says Mulholland #entarch
• lmelsted: Transformed enterprises must be integrated and practice controlled change acc to Andy Mullholland of Capgemini

And a few more miscellaneous items:

• mikejwalker: Open Group Conference San Francisco Day 1 Keynotes – Pt1:  http://t.co/HD4F3fOQ #entarch
• mikejwalker: Open Group Conference San Francisco Day 1 Keynotes – Full coverage http://bit.ly/yeuuZo #entarch
• nadsmat2diworld: Way too cold in this room but only ~10 percent of participants female so likelihood of getting A/C temp turned up is low #entarch

Keynote by Lauren States:

• Dana_Gardner: Up next at The Open Group conference: Lauren States, VP and CTO for Cloud Growth Initiatives at #IBM #entarch #cloud
• lmelsted: Lauren States, VP & CTO, Cloud and Growth Initiatives from IBM at #ogsfo
• Dana_Gardner: A new reality is roiling business around customers, employees, partners and competitors, says IBM’s States #entarch #cloud
• stevenunn: Lauren States, IBM VP & CTO Cloud Computing & Growth Initiatives speaking on making business drive IT transformation through EA
• Dana_Gardner: You have to move fast to succeed in the new environment, says IBM’s States #entarch #cloud
• WGoedvriend: Interesting talks on enterprise architecture amd evolving business the struggle within companies worldwide
• nadsmat2diworld: CIOs and CMOs are aligned that analytics, insight, client intimacy – critically important -Lauren States #entarch
• Dana_Gardner: Requirements mean a huge emphasis on analytics; and so need to integrate IT and analytics better, says IBM’s States #entarch #cloud
• theopengroup: “CMOs are overwhelming underprepared for the data explosion and recognize need to invest in and integrate technology and analytics”
• lmelsted: CMOs are underprepared for data explosion and need to invest in tech and analytics to help control branding says IBM’s States
• stevenunn: Lauren States, IBM: CMOs are underprepared for data explosion & recognize need to invest in & integrate technology & analytics
• mikejwalker: #IBM highlighting their C-Suite Study – Highlights the CIO survey http://www-935.ibm.com/services/c-suite/cio/study.html #entarch
• Dana_Gardner: Business process excellence, values-based culture, IT-enablement form core of IBM’s transformation credo, says States #entarch #cloud
• stevenunn: Lauren States, IBM: IBM’s transformation focus areas are enabling growth, productivity, and culture change #entarch
• lmelsted: Culture, biz process excellence and IT enablement drive approach to transformation using #entarch at IBM says States
• systemsflow: @lauren_states: Need to evolve IT beyond traditional business models to enable a new, social business model; echos Capgemini msg
• theopengroup: IBM look at enterprise transformation and IT as one critical function reporting to the CEO – @Lauren_States >good to see that.
• Dana_Gardner: Of course, #IBM has been transforming itself since 1994, and quite successfully #entarch #cloud
• stevenunn: Lauren States, IBM: Transformation of IBM through EA has cut operating costs by about $1.5bn ! #entarch
• RealLouw: Great to “sit in” on IBM thought leadership presentation in #ogsfo, while at the same time having a braai in South Africa – WebEx Rules
• systemsflow: @lauren_states reports that IBM reduced from 128 CIO’s to one.  There’s a “how many CIO’s” joke in there somewhere…
• stevenunn: Lauren States: IBM’s cloud strategy is committed to open standards #opengroup #cloud
• mikejwalker: IBM reduces their application portfolio by 2/3 with cloud transformation #entarch
• industryleaders: Listening IBM i just remember togaf tutorial Latin American Enterprise Transformation with TOGAF today 2pm
• Dana_Gardner: #IBM using cloud extensively internally, with lots of big metrics on savings and benefits, says IBM’s States #entarch #cloud
• systemsflow: @lauren_states: “Email-less man” at IBM loses 30lbs using social networking as a communication medium
• Dana_Gardner: Cloud sweet-spot in near-term is exploiting it for marketing, sales and customer service, says IBM’s States #entarch #cloud
• industryleaders: IBM is talking about lessons learned hey reduce their application portfolio by 2/3 with cloud transformation
• lmelsted: Analytics a crucial theme during each morning keynote at The Open Group San Francisco Conference #entarch
• systemsflow: @lauren_states: Email-less IBMer loses 30lb using social netw; apparently social netw is healthy for more than the enterprise!

Presentation by Madhav Naidu:

• theopengroup:: Coffee break has ended. Listening to Madhav Naidu with @Ciena talk #Enterprise Transformation at #ogSFO! http://ow.ly/8Lo6P
• systemsflow: Naidu reviewing how Ciena built out #entarch team from scratch in response to organizational change.

Presentation by Brian Cameron:

• stevenunn: Brian Cameron, Center for EA, Penn State University presenting on ROI, value measurement & best practices for the enterprise #entarch
• stevenunn: Brian Cameron, Center for EA, Penn State: 4 focus areas of EA Initiative – undergrad, masters, professional development & research
• mikejwalker: Open Group certifies graduates from Penn State based on skills not competences. NOT TOGAF but framework agnostic. #entarch
• mikejwalker: Penn State wants to create “Pre-Med” school for Enterprise Architects it doesn’t make you an EA, must go through residency #entarch
• mikejwalker: Penn State launching Professional Masters in EA degree program in the Fall. Expansion Center for EA #entarch
• mikejwalker: Penn State keeps it course “evergreen” through many members from public and private sector #entarch >same principle as in art-colleges
• theopengroup: Penn State researching the application of #entarch to areas outside of IT >hooray! it’s about time someone did…
• systemsflow: Brian Cameron, Penn State Center for #entarch doing research on an EA maturity framework that is not IT centric.  Publishing soon.
• mikejwalker: Penn State research surfaces that Value Management is low. Stats – 41 do, 54 don’t measure, 5% don’t know #entarch
• theopengroup: In Penn State study, ROI was the most popular financial metric used by EAs #entarch #EAvaluemeasurement
• mikejwalker: Penn State research says ROI is most popular value measure BUT is the worst one to use. #entarch >yep…
• systemsflow: Half the orgs surveyed in Penn State Center for #entarch study have no EA measurement practice in place.
• mikejwalker: Penn State started independant Federation of Enterprise Architect Professional Organizations http://www.feapo.org #entarch

Presentation by Mario Tokoro:

• Technodad: Mario Tokoro, CEO Sony Computer Science Labs: growing complexity of netwk systems, new regulations need new approach to dependability
• Technodad: Tokoro at #ogsfo: must treat dependability as open system problem. Needs iterative processes, dependability cases. http://post.ly/52I1w
• Technodad: Tokoro’s challenge: Can dependable engineering processes needed for dynamic open systems be mapped to TOGAF?

Miscellaneous again:

• Technodad: Yutaka Matsuno presents D-case methodology – dependability cases for complex open systems http://post.ly/52IdM
• Technodad: The Open Group publishes Future Air Capability Environment standard for open composeable defense avionics: http://bit.ly/xRySUU

Presentation by Marc Walker:

• togaf_r: Marc Walker: Using ontologies in business is still in its infancy
• EricStephens: Marc walker : it’s about the meaning between #entarch elements

And more miscellaneous:

• JWDijkstra: RT @stevenunn: Allen Brown, The Open Group CEO: “Enterprise Architects must not only deliver value, but BE SEEN to deliver value”.
• theopengroup:: Now before lunch, listening to @theopengroup CTO Mike Lambert brief #TOGAF 9 http://ow.ly/8Loeu

Presentation presumably by someone from HP:

• systemsflow: HP developed a Self-Service Architecture Resource Center to codify architecture basics and help junior architects build skills.
• mikejwalker: HP built lightweight EA Process (LEAP) to help aspiring / junior architects. When more rigor needed a EA Fwk. used #entarch
• systemsflow: #EntArch must provide good info UP to guide investment decision and strategic planning and DOWN to guide solution implementations.
• systemsflow: A consistent set of methods and a common language is critical to bridge the enterprise/solution architecture gap.

And yet more miscellaneous:

• togaf_r: The Open Group Architecture Forum TOGAF Next Working Group meets this afternoon http://t.co/16EnVV8g >will this version finally break free of IT-centrism? – we have to hope…
• AvolutionAbacus: Painfully obvious that some of the competition are on their last legs by the whole tone and body language of their presenters at #ogSFO. >what competition? – this doesn’t make sense…
• joshuabrickman: High level weaseling seems to be a new standards development method

Presentation by Russ Gibfried:

• systemsflow: Critical 1st steps in launching EA: a charter, principles, and a comm plan.  @rgibfried “Gaining/Retaining an Arch Practice.”
• systemsflow: Starting EA is easy – who doesn’t like motherhood and apple pie?  Sustaining is where the rubber hits the road. @rgibfried
• theopengroup: What are two ways to improve EA message? Have a clear line of sight linking business objectives to expected outcomes // Demonstrate balance between short-term value and long-term visioning #entarch @rgibfried
• systemsflow: @rgibfried: ill-defined roles,too IT focused,poor communication,ivory tower,governance police,forgotten stakeholders = #EntArch #FAIL
• systemsflow: Getting your EA charter signed by your CxO stakeholder gets you a seat at “the rest of the organization.” @rgibfried #entarch
• theopengroup: “#Entarch is not a spectator sport” @rgibfried
• systemsflow: @rgibfried losing me on sports analogy.  Wish he stuck with Star Wars. I think “in the zone” means the force is with me.

Presentation by Frank Chen:

• EricStephens: Frank Chen emphasizing the vocabulary disconnect among #entarch folks. Important to define terms. >to agree on usage of defined terms – defining alone is not enough…
• systemsflow: Build your #entarch  Capabilities as a core competency first then execute.  Frank Chen speaks to a common theme here at #ogsfo.

Presentation by Alan Hakimi:

• mikejwalker: Watching the Alan Hakimi talk about EA and Zen #entarch
• stevenunn: Listening to Alan Hakimi, Senior EA, Enterprise Strategy Services, Microsoft on “Zen & The Art of Modern EA – Rethinking the Mess”
• stevenunn: Alan Hakimi, Microsoft: ‘Stafford Beer was one of the first Enterprise Architects. How did we lose all that knowledge?” #entarch >hooray, someone acknowledges Beer!
• Cybersal: @tetradian re @stevenunn: #ogsfo mention of Stafford Beer…the knowledge lives on here  http://is.gd/52xpPX #scio  #entarch
• stevenunn: Alan Hakimi, Microsoft recommending Peter Senge’s book “The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization”
• mikejwalker: Alan Hakimi -Don’t build your own meta-models use Archimate #entarch >would be fine if it wasn’t so incomplete…
• stevenunn: Alan Hakimi, Microsoft: Using ArchiMate(R) meta-model can avoid having to worry about all the proprietary meta-models. #entarch
• stevenunn: Alan Hakimi, Microsoft: Example of airport lounges in Dubai: Imposing governance in a way that the end user doesn’t realize! #entarch
• stevenunn: Alan Hakimi,, Microsoft talking of using systems dynamics to evolve EA #entarch
• mrevoir: Alan Hakimi at #ogsfo appreciate the beauty of gray

Presentation by Henry Franken:

• brendabizz: Henry Franken CEOBiZZdesign speaking at #ogSFO Successfully Implementing EA w TOGAF & ArchiMate good eg’s showing transition architectures
• ArchiMate_r: Henry Franken: ArchiMate:Adding value to TOGAF: ArchiSurance case study to be made available w/ ArchiMate 2.0 tomorrow
• ArchiMate_r: Franken: ArchiMate closes the gap between free-format strategy models and detailed solutions architecture models
• ArchiMate_r: Franken: ArchiMate : Easy to use, step by step to move to advanced use. Designed specifically for EA

Presentation by Stuart Boardman:

• systemsflow: Stuart Boardman: “#entarch is more effective if it is outside of IT.” >yes yes yes! (b/c IT is only one part of EA)

Presentation by Nicholas Hill and Musharaf Mughal:

• stevenunn: Nicholas Hill, Infosys & Musharaf Mughal, Manulife Financial begin their talk on the virtual EA team (VEAT)
• stevenunn: Musharaf Mughal, Manulife Financial: We engaged consultants (Infosys) to get a lot of our EA work done #entarch
• stevenunn: Musharaf Mughal, Manulife: The virtual EA team comprises industry-credentialed individuals – in TOGAF(R) & other certifications
• stevenunn: Musharaf Mughal, Manulife Financial: Cultural challenges have been mostly intra-company, not inter-company #entarch
• stevenunn: Musharaf Mughal, Manulife Financial: We are not “outsourcing architecture”, we are “outsourcing some of the mechanics of the EA work”
• stevenunn: Nicholas Hill, Infosys: Manulife Financial have adopted the TOGAF (R) framework
• stevenunn: Musharaf Mughal, Manulife Financial: I have added 2 “trained business architects”, but I’m not certain what that means #entarch
• stevenunn: Nicholas Hill, Infosys: As required, Manulife adds specialized architects to the Infosys architect pool #entarch
• stevenunn: Musharaf Mughal, Manulife Financial: We are portraying the EA team as the guys who help you get what you need #entarch #aea
• stevenunn: Hill: VEAT value prop: Improve quality, enhance development cycle, systematically manage risk, drive standardization & reduce TCO
• stevenunn: Musharaf Mughal, Manulife: We are already reaping the rewards of using EA standards and re-useable building blocks per TOGAF(R)
• stevenunn: Mughal: CSFs – ease of doing business, broad acceptance & adoption by line of business, near-term success, & keeping up with demand
• stevenunn: Musharaf Mughal, Manulife: The EA thought-leadership is still in-house – we out-sourced some of the “getting stuff done” #entarch

And finally, a few more assorted items that I can’t connect to anything else:

• EricStephens: Rise of the (business) machines by Mans Bhuller. Are IT depts doomed?
• industryleaders: i get lost  i feel suddenly in a SUN Prepackaged HW Sales Bundle : (
• industryleaders: people from audience also told do not forget governance, risks , business readiness before an IT proposal

—

That’s it for now: more tomorrow. Hope it’s been of some use to someone, anyways.

I need to be upfront about this: I don’t regard Open Group as ‘the bad guys’. Far from it: they’re an extremely important IT-standards body, and they do very important work indeed throughout the IT space. Yet it seems that whenever they touch anything that isn’t explicitly IT, they bring with them a perhaps-understandable yet entirely inappropriate IT-centric view of the world: and as a result, make a complete hash of it. Every darn time… And for the sake of all of us – including themselves – they really need to stop doing this…

On this occasion, it’s about business-architecture, specifically a transcript of Dana Gardner’s panel-session at the last Open Group conference, back in July: ‘PODCAST: Exploring business-IT alignment: A 20-year struggle culminating in the role and impact of Business Architecture‘. There’s a lot of good sense in there – no question about that – and for anyone involved in enterprise-architecture it’s definitely a ‘must-read’. Yet when I look at the sections that attempt to define business-architecture, and its relations to enterprise-architecture and IT-architectures, all I can do is weep:

[Dave van Gelder] Currently in the Business Architecture Working Group, we see business architecture as something that brings the balance between all the other architectures in the company — that’s IT architecture, financial architecture, money, people architecture, and a lot of other architectures.  If business architecture is bringing the balance between the different aspects of a company, then business architecture is something that should be handled in the top of the organization, because balance should be created between all the different aspects in the organization.

(I was present at that start-up meeting Dave describes, by the way, at the Open Group conference in Lisbon back in 2006. A very good conversation then that unfortunately seems to have gone almost nowhere: the main point I remember was that I was perhaps the only person there who didn’t speak Dutch… )

Well, yes, that definition is fine, in its own way – except that that’s actually the linking role of enterprise-architecture. There’s no distinct ‘architecture of the business of the business’ here: in other words, no business-architecture. And it gets worse:

[Harry Hendrickx] When we look at the enterprise architect and the solution architect, the business architect focuses more on the complete implications of the strategy and technology trends on the operations, whereas the enterprise architect is more interested in the IT and the implications for the IT strategy and how IT should be deployed. The business architect is much more focused on the complete performance of the business operations.

In other words, despite Walter Stahlecker’s explanatory document for the Business Architecture Working Group back in 2008, and despite Len Fehskens’ excellent article on ‘Enterprise architecture’s quest for its identity‘ on the Open Group’s own weblog, the Open Group still fails to grasp the bald fact that enterprise-architecture is not an IT-role, and that the term ‘enterprise-architecture’ is not a synonym for ‘enterprise-scope IT-architecture’ – the latter being what is actually meant by ‘enterprise architect’ above.

As Len Fehskens makes clear in his article, enterprise-architecture is the architecture of the enterprise – and the enterprise (or extended-enterprise, if you prefer) extends not just beyond IT, but also a long way beyond the organisation itself. In enterprise-architecture, we develop an architecture for an organisation, but about the extended-enterprise or ‘ecosystem-with-purpose’ within which it operates. It’s also a much broader scope than the architecture of the ‘the business of the business’ – in other words, the domain-architecture that we would properly describe as ‘business-architecture’.

But what we have here is, unfortunately, yet another Open Group mess. Enterprise-architecture is sort-of defined as an IT role, tasked with bridging the gap between IT and ‘anything not-IT’. Business-architecture variously either takes on an organisation-centric variant of the real enterprise-architecture role (as in Dave van Gelder’s comment above), or a muddled mixture of ‘the architecture of everything not-IT’ (as in Harry Hendrickx’s comment) – the exact same IT-centric mistake as in Phase B of the TOGAF ADM. How this is supposed to help in bridging the infamous ‘business-IT divide’, when just about everything here will clearly increase it, I just do not know…

Perhaps the most worrying point, though, is this:

[Dana Gardner] Anyone else with some thoughts about how to make the certification and standardization of this stick?

[Mieke Mahakena] What we’ve been doing in the Business Forum, after we decided that business architecture has its own reason for existence, we described the business architecture profession – what’s the scope and what should be the outcome of business architecture. Now, we’re working on the practice of business architecture by defining a framework, looking at methods, and defining approaches you can use to do business architecture.

Parallel to that, if you know what the profession is and what the practice is, you’re able to create the business architecture certification, because those things help you define the required skills and experience a business architect needs. So, we are working on that in the Business Forum.

Why is this worrying? To see why, you need to click on the ‘Business Forum’ link. It takes you to a password-protected page – which, by examining the link, you’ll realise is only accessible to Open Group’s ‘Platinum’ members. The ‘big boys’: no mere mortals allowed here, thank you very much. Which should remind us, yet again, just how ‘open’ the Open Group actually isn’t: in fact, it operates a ‘pay for play’ membership, a straightforward hierarchy in which the only real rule is that the ‘big boys’ always win. So what we have in the Business Forum is a group of large IT-consultancies who’ve demonstrated over and over again that they have barely a freakin’ clue about anything beyond IT, supposedly defining the entirety of the business-architecture profession, discipline and certification, all of it behind closed doors, and with no input or review from anyone beyond IT. If you’re working in enterprise-architecture, and that fact doesn’t worry you, it should…

Again, some good ideas scattered throughout that transcript: but overall…? – well, perhaps the only word that could describe it is ‘yikes…’? Sorry, guys, but we definitely need to do better than this. Please?

Oh well.

These questions came up for me whilst exploring the architectural processes we could use in expanding a business-model developed in Business Model Canvas out into the detail needed for real-world implementation. Archimate should be the obvious standard to use in describing an overall architecture: but at present it’s not so much IT-oriented as almost entirely IT-centric, and a real-world business-model involves a lot more than just IT. Yet if the only available standard only describes the IT, what on earth can we use to describe everything else? And how can we link everything else back to the IT? Therein lies the problem.

Let’s step back a bit. More like a decade, actually.

Archimate started out as means to solve some real architectural problems for users of large IT-systems in the Netherlands. A consortium of academics, IT-consultancies, business-users and government was brought together, to address how to link all the different layers of the IT-domains together, from the business needs, down through the IT-applications and data, all the way to the actual IT-infrastructure that supported all of those needs. In other words, the usual IT-oriented layering that we see in TOGAF and so many other ‘enterprise’-architecture frameworks.

That kind of layering does make perfect sense if the focus of concern is IT, and if the business of the business revolves primarily around information. In other words, it fits well with IT-architectures for information-centric businesses such as banking, finance, insurance and tax – hence the reason why the usual Archimate ‘demonstrator’ is an imaginary insurance-company called ‘Archisurance’.

But this doesn’t make sense – or rather, is far too constrained and constraining – if the focus of concern is anything other than IT, or for any type of business whose business is not centred solely around information. Which latter, in reality, is the case for most businesses – if not all of them, once we start looking at the deeper detail of most business-models.

Which means that, for those of us involved in real enterprise-scope architecture, business-architecture, security-architecture, process-architecture, or any kind of architecture that touches just about anything other than IT, we have a problem here. A big problem.

A problem which in some ways is actually getting worse.

Which means it’s a problem that, collectively, we need to do something about, right now. Urgently.

Why do I say it’s getting worse? Well, take a look at this section from Chapter 2 of the original Archimate Primer [PDF], from back in 2004:

In the enterprise-architecture modelling language that we propose, the service concept plays a central role. A service is defined as a unit of functionality that some entity (e.g. a system, organisation or department) makes available to its environment, and which has some value for certain entities in the environment.

It’s clear that ‘service’ here is intended to be generic – not solely IT. And service-orientation is a certainly good place to start for whole-enterprise architectures.

The chapter-text continues with a brief summary of that all-too-common IT-oriented layering of ‘Business’, ‘Application’ and ‘Technology’. The accompanying diagram and text, though, do make it clear that there’s more to the context than IT alone, and that we do need to take the broader enterprise into account, beyond just the organisation itself:

The Business layer offers products and services to external customers, which are realised in the organisation by business processes performed by business actors. … On top of the Business layer, a separate Environment layer may be added, modelling the external customers that make use of the services of the organisation (although these may also be considered part of the Business layer).

So far, so good. It’s about services, and about the broader enterprise; it’s IT-oriented, but not IT-centric as such.

Yet somewhere, things started to go badly wrong, from an enterprise-architecture perspective.

Somewhen around 2008 or so, with the aim of making the still-somewhat-prototype standard more available worldwide, Archimate was transferred to the ownership and aegis of the Open Group. That move no doubt seemed sensible enough at the time: but the problem is that the Open Group is an IT-standards body, not an architecture body – and that built-in orientation towards IT starts to show even in the very first sentence of the Archimate version 1.0 formal standard, published in 2009:

An architecture is typically developed because key people have concerns that need to be addressed by the business and IT systems within the organization.

And by the time we reach the standard’s chapter on Enterprise Architecture, that all-too-common IT-centrism is in full flood:

The primary reason for developing an enterprise architecture is to support the business by providing the fundamental technology and process structure for an IT strategy. Further, it details the structure and relationships of the enterprise, its business models, the way an organization will work, and how and in what way information, information systems, and technology will support the organization’s business objectives and goals. This makes IT a responsive asset for a successful modern business strategy.

Today’s CEOs know that the effective management and exploitation of information through IT is the key to business success, and the indispensable means to achieving competitive advantage. An enterprise architecture addresses this need, by providing a strategic context for the evolution of the IT system in response to the constantly changing needs of the business environment.

You could just about get away with that kind of myopia in 2009, though even then its absurdity was beginning to be more widely recognised. Two years later, it’s probable that most members of Open Group would acknowledge that there are some serious limitations there, and many – such as Len Fehskens and Microsoft’s Mike Walker – are much more overt in asserting the need to break out of the IT-centric box.

In short, we need an Archimate for enterprise-architecture – not just IT-architecture. We need – and need urgently – an Archimate that isn’t all-but-uselessly IT-centric.

And yes, the good news is that a new version of the Archimate standard is due for release Real Soon Now. Hooray!

The bad news is that this new version isn’t likely to help much at all. If anything, it’s likely to make it worse…

I’m not a member of the Open Group or the Archimate forum, so I’m not directly involved in the update. But from what I hear from colleagues who are involved, the new version will be just as IT-centric as the old one. That text above apparently remains completely unchanged in the new standard: which means that its definition of ‘enterprise’-architecture is not so much out of date as just plain wrong. I’m told there are a couple of new sections to the metamodel: one is on motivation, to sort-of link it to the well-known Business Motivation Model; the other is about projects and dynamics, linking to and in some ways improving on the TOGAF 9 metamodel. I gather that there are a few new generic entities, such as Location, which would be not so much useful as essential. And Product, which used to be defined as “a coherent collection of services, accompanied by a contract/set of agreements, which is offered as a whole to (internal or external) customers”, is now apparently defined in even more rigidly IT-centric terms, as something like “a collection of financial or information services, with a contract that gives the customer the right to use the associated services”. Which doesn’t leave any space for descriptions of physical product or service, or relationship-oriented services – which is what most businesses actually deliver.

In other words, fine for the relatively small subset of enterprise-architecture that focusses around IT, but almost useless for anything else.

Which is not good news for enterprise-architecture.

So what can we do about it?

One option, I suppose, is to yell loudly at Open Group, and try to make it evident even to the most IT-obsessed of their big-consultancy members that this is nowhere near good enough. Sadly, I don’t think that’s going to work…

Another might be to ask the original Archimate group – Telematica Instituut and others – to retrieve the standard from Open Group, so that we actually have a chance to make it work again. Sadly, I don’t think that’s going to happen either.

Another option might be to use the Profiles facility in Archimate to define a much broader metamodel, particularly around the physical and relational analogues to the information-space that IT partially covers. That at least is doable – but the problem is that without a standards-body to coordinate all the various needed extensions, we’ll soon have no standard at all. Not a standard that we could for interchange, anyway, and not one that we could get the vendors to standardise on, to at last enable us to move architecture-models between the various vendors’ toolsets. Yet it doesn’t seem to be in Open Group’s interest that this essential work takes place, and at present there’s no-one else to take on that role.

Which at present, and for the foreseeable future, leaves us without a notation/exchange standard that we can use for enterprise-architecture. Again. After all these years. Sigh…

Over to you, folks: any ideas for anything that can get us out of this metamodel mess?

Various breaks added to split the overall Twitter-stream into (I hope) more meaningful clusters; I’ve also added comments in various places in italics preceded by a ‘>’ marker, >like this.

There’s quite a lot of it, so take a wander after the ‘Read more…’ break.

• theopengroup: The program for today’s conference is available at http://ow.ly/5EWd8 and on the mobile site at http://ow.ly/5EWfK

• systemsflow: All about business architecture day 1 at #ogaus
• systemsflow: Business Architecture: can’t every business be boiled down to one use case name: Make Money? Drill down from there >no, it can’t: this is exactly what not to do for #entarch / #bizarch…
• systemsflow: RT @systemsflow Can’t every business be boiled down to one use case: Make Money? Drill down from there // forgot govmn’t: Win Mission >’make money’ / ‘win mission’ etc are subsidiary #entarch aims for specific stakeholders: understand whole-enterprise first!
• tetradian: @systemsflow we develop #entarch for an organisation, but about whole-enterprise – are not the same! http://slidesha.re/8wWNSq
• tetradian: systemsflow: “theme for today is ‘benefit bottom line w/EA = succeed’” – hmm. indicates limited model of how enterprise works…?
• JWGaus: @tetradian @systemsflow #entarch there are too many nuances of ‘make money’, the next level of detail is needed.  Too generic to be useful. // define vision and principles for how to ‘make money’ and define enterprise structure to that. // summarize higher than your vision and principles and you’ve lost your enterprise.
• tetradian: RT @JWGaus: define vision / principles for how to ‘make money’ , define enterprise structure to that. >wrong way round? http://bit.ly/9zU9J
• Cybersal: @tetradian @systemsflow The negative consequences of focusing on bottom line ahead of everything else http://bit.ly/oYCEiE #entarch #bizarch
• iansthomas: RT @systemsflow BizArch can’t every biz be boiled down to 1 use case: Make Money? <custs or emps r more attracted to purpose >exactly!
• JWGaus: @tetradian #entarch Yes, #sustainability is a key thing I was referring to in “nuances of making money”. Making money must include it // #sustainability includes care of enterprise ecosystem, people, and yes, the planet. Oh, and shareholders

• theopengroup: David Baker, PriceWaterhouseCoopers: How do you manage the complexity of running a business while trying to transform it?
• larrycincy: David Baker showing how to have business plan become the foundation of connecting solutions to business intent <- interesting goal
• theopengroup: Baker cites Disney: moving from from physical assets to intellectual prop. Investors are valuing those moving to an IP landlord space
• industryleaders: business capability maps current and future critical for impact analysis and EA Live from Austin Open Group
• theopengroup: Baker: Strategic planning requires architects from both business and technology competencies, a true multidisciplinary team

• theopengroup: Next up: “The Devon Energy #EA Story” Tim Barnes, Chief Architect, Devon Energy
• theopengroup: “Devon Energy’s Enterprise Architecture Journey” presented by Tim Barnes, chief architect at Devon presenting an #EA case study
• theopengroup: Devon utilized an urban planning-like vision to reduce complexity of Devon’s info systems and technologies (the result of 26 mergers)
• theopengroup: Barnes agrees with Baker: successful #EA requires multidisciplined team that includes non-architects and various kinds of architects
• larrycincy: Devon Energy got matrixed team with executive sponsorship to ensure EA function success
• theopengroup: It’s been 2 years since #EA effort began at Devon; $16 million in hard-dollar savings recognized, 227 apps/technologies retired
• theopengroup: Other successes at devon: Common languages created, permanent business owners for every system across divisions, repeatable processes
• productmarketer: “227 applications retired. $16m in hard savings” Tim Barnes, Chief Architect at Devon’s Energy presenting #entarch case study at #ogaus
• systemsflow: Important point in @devonenergy talk at #ogaus: what’s the right mix of consultants & employees for a large organization’s EA practice?
• theopengroup: Tim Barnes sharing three key successes and seven lessons learned during the course of Devon Energy’s successful implementation of #EA
• systemsflow: Japanese manufacturing mantra: if you can’t measure it you can’t improve it. True for EA work too
• practicingEA: Nice observation from Chief Arch of energy company. Everyone defines application differently. W/o common Defn, how can u measure? // Corollary from last tweet…if u can’t define EA how can you measure it’s results? #entarch
• systemsflow: Devon Energy’s Tim Barnes this morning: Critical to have the business – not IT – deliver EA-related communications.

• theopengroup: Last plenary speaker today: Mike Walker, Microsoft: “The New World of #EA, from IT Architecture to Enterprise Architecture”
• theopengroup: Mike Walker, Microsoft speaking: Where is #EA going? What are TOGAF’s complementing methods, models, tools? How does Micrsoft do it?
• theopengroup: Walker: IT is the business. The two are the same. There needs to be partnership, not just alignment between IT and the business #ogaus >??? – might be true at Microsoft, but in most places IT is part of the business, not ‘is’ the business
• systemsflow: Microsoft’s Mike Walker: Forget about IT “aligning with” the business; IT is *part of* the business. >(okay, Mike got it right, OG misquoted)
• theopengroup: Walker: 71% of execs say that IT must be tightly integrated with biz strategy; only 27% say this actually happens (McKinsey)
• stevenunn: Mike Walker of Microsoft: “Must ensure there’s a balance between IT Architecture and Enterprise Architecture.” >and Mike is one who does understand there’s a difference…
• stevenunn: Mike Walker: Also need balance between IQ and EQ (soft/emotional skills). Only the combining the 2 will get EA a “seat at the table”
• theopengroup: Walker: IQ’s technical know-how must be balanced by EQ, which is motivational/empathetic to customer/stakeholders
• systemsflow: Good point from Microsoft’s Mike Walker: IQ gets an enterprise architect noticed, EQ (emotional intelligence) gets you further
• stevenunn: Mike Walker: “EA connects strategy & implementation” // Mike Walker of Microsoft: “We believe in The Open Group’s tagline [mission] of Boundaryless Information Flow.”
• systemsflow: Interesting quandary for a technology product company (e.g. @microsoft) who also sells EA services: can it “eat its own dogfood”?
• stevenunn: Mike Walker of Microsoft “3 things to remember for EA: mindset, methods, & make it happen”
• theopengroup: Walker: Microsoft’s framework leverages many other frameworks, including TOGAF; Most important is common vocabulary
• henryfranken: Nice quote today in Austin (#ogaus) by Mike Walker: ‘Microsoft is actively using ArchiMate in our engagements with end customers’

• theopengroup: Heading into tracks! World Class #EA Workshop; Professionalizing the Discipline of EA; Strategic View of Secure Computing in 2030

• systemsflow: Peter Haviland in “World Class EA” talk at #ogaus – US regulatory regime provides “happy hunting ground” for EAs. Don’t we know it…
• systemsflow: Rolf Siegers from Raytheon: Big difference between trained architects and certified architects. >but what’s the difference? – oh well, I guess that’s why we go to conferences…
• systemsflow: How do architects get extracted from SWAT project-level problem-solving? First: be paid not by a project but by operations
• systemsflow: Greg Akers: EA documentation into the wrong hands is a huge threat to an organization
• systemsflow: Architectural significance: useful concept/litmus test for what IT projects need an EAs attention
• systemsflow: Is there a reason the “Architecture at the Project Level” block in @theopengroup EA capabilities map is red??

• Technodad: Whitlock at #ogaus: We moved the world economy to the Internet – without a backup plan. >v.good point… #entarch #economics

• jamestaulbut: RT @theopengroup: RT @systemsflow:  <so who carries the can for tech delivery excellence? Also ops with give them the service issues. // also architects need to take responsibilty for their architectures and not sit in ivory towers

• systemsflow: Brian Hopkins from @Forrester makes good point about Big Data projects – business use them to flip requirements/solution sequence
• systemsflow: Cute concept from Brian Hopkins @Forrester – “Dirty ODS”. 360 customer view solutions are largely unicorns. Mash it up instead?
• larrycincy: Brian Hopkins @Forrester – “No data is discarded anymore” at one company

• mikejwalker: #entarch can learn from Benjamin Franklin “Vision without implementation is hallucination”. EA connects strategy to implementation >strong agree

• systemsflow: Job descriptions are independent of roles, but often cause confusion among project participants. (Hint: Use a RACI matrix.)

• systemsflow: James Stikeleather makes an observation regarding the “life safety” issues we face due to the tie between cyber and physical worlds. >yup – which is why calling #itarch ‘#entarch’ is so darn dangerous…

• systemsflow: Forde & Haviland reviewed EA capabilities map: http://sfi.cc/og1. @systemsflow EA capabilities target: http://sfi.cc/mentoring

systemsflow: Raveesh Dewan:  Enterprise Architects at CareFirst are centrally funded (not project funded.)  Project partners not project members.

• aogeacolombia: ea is about people, enterprise and it capabilities transformation thanks to a clear strategy lets align strategy and execution

• systemsflow: Refaat Shulaiba now speaking: Rapid Business Transformations in Health Care: A Systems Approach

• systemsflow: @BalajiPrasad_ speaking soon.  Enterprise Architect – more than a technologist // One of the most interesting side-benefit of #ogaus is learning about the different business lines our EA colleagues work in
• systemsflow: The one thing that is common to all our approaches is that there is nothing in common. @BalajiPrasad_
• systemsflow: Getting “shot at & wounded” is part of the experience required to become a strong EA @BalajiPrasad_ >sadly true…

• systemsflow: Repeated meme in the #ogaus security track: Pervasive Simplicity. Great example – gmail, send, manage, find email w/minimal effort

• systemsflow: Business “capabilities” a common theme today at #ogaus. The challenge: Ensuring all stakeholders agree on what the term means. >yep: that’s a big challenge…

• theopengroup: Final tracks of the day: EA and Biz Strategy; Data and Information Management; Strategic View of Secure Computing in 2030

• theopengroup: Ramírez: giving insightful, practical advice on how companies in Latin America are relating their #EA to their mission statements
• theopengroup: Ramírez: Social environment and responsibility part of Latin America #EA philosophy >yes! – real #entarch

• theopengroup: Now Dave Hornford, Conexiam, speaking on “Accelerating Value: Align Focus to Desired Outcomes & Investment”
• theopengroup: Hornford: If you want to chase value as an enterprise architect, you need to ask: What problem are we trying to solve? // When orgs shut down EA practice then start up again they’re looking for a solution to a problem. Engage and solve that prob #EA
• theopengroup: Hornford: Successful EA teams are closely aligned to strategy, clear objectives, deliver up and execute = that is delivering value!

• systemsflow: #entarch Info sharing shift: From “Need to know” to “Responsibility to share” >strong agree #km #collab
• systemsflow: Heat mapping of systems getting a lot of mentions as a means of targeting IT investments.
• systemsflow: Siegers: Establishing certification process can take years but helps ensure everyone is executing architecture process consistently.
• systemsflow: Mei Selvage of IBM: 1 current challenge: “No information architecture, or architectures don’t land into projects”. What’s worse?
• systemsflow: “Tacit Knowledge” – aka the ultimate info management anti-pattern: “Don’t write it down”. Make it explicit #entarch >nice idea, but contradicts most #km experience – e.g. Snowden “people know more than they can say, and say more than they can write down”
• systemsflow: Siegers: Requiring architecture review board members to be certified enhances their credibility in evaluating others’ work.

• systemsflow: Deloitte’s William Sheleg spoke earlier on EA and Business Transformation: How to Architect for the Future.
• systemsflow: Sheleg: Future architectures require understanding the aspirations, strategic priorities and capabilities req’d for…
• systemsflow: Sheleg: Evaluate target capabilities in terms of business value, risk, and affordability to identify path(s) to the future.

• systemsflow: Eugene Imbaba of IBM: “I don’t want 3g/4g/etc – I want phone service” – solution architecture models shld avoid lingo
• systemsflow: Mei Selvage of IBM’s response to “what about ‘good enough’ data quality?” – depends on business – core/non-core? Sliding scale

• systemsflow: Open Group Austin day 1 roundup blog post: http:/sfi.cc/sfi3js #entarch

—

• lynnesquer: Beginning Day Two at the conference (@ The Open Group Conference, Austin #ogaus w/ @a_josey @grahambb) http://4sq.com/n9tkLF
• theopengroup: The program for today’s conference is available at http://ow.ly/5EVgh and on the mobile site at http://ow.ly/5EVhk

• theopengroup: Starting the morning with Open Group CEO Allen Brown and Dr. Peter Alterman, NIST, setting the stage for #security & #Cloud plenary
• mikejwalker: Peter Alterman – “I don’t call it cloud, I call it fog” #entarch
• theopengroup: Peter Alterman, NSTIC: “Industry knows a whole lot more about you and me than government does”
• mikejwalker: Alterman – Don’t worry about the government knowing too much about you,the private sector has much more information on you #entarch
• theopengroup: NSTIC goal by 2016: ability to choose among various identity providers and electronic identity credentials for secure transactions
• systemsflow: Dr. Peter Alterman now speaking on the Digital Identity Challenge. // Alterman: We as users/consumers are all responsible for what privacy standards and expectations look like. // Alterman on NSTIC: We think we can have security and privacy without losing our civil liberties.
• mikejwalker: NSTIC wants to avoid a George Orwell 1984 scenario to protect privacy and civil liberties
• systemsflow: Dr Peter Alterman of NSTIC is quite a comedian. Who knew trusted identity was so fun! #entarch
• theopengroup: Alterman: “I think we can have privacy without losing fundamental civil liberties”
• theopengroup: Alterman: there is interest in NSTIC initiatives by social network providers… but not all, notably a “major player”
• systemsflow: Alterman: There is no single solution to identity problem.
• JWGaus: @mikejwalker re:Alterman #entarch Yeah I was surprised Google+ didn’t fill out my profile for me.
• theopengroup: Alterman: Smart credential-based ID cards are already being used but won’t be whole solution; no need to stifle innovation

• mikejwalker: Learned that Armadillo’s contain leprosy but humans originally gave it to them! So don’t eat them or it’s payback…

• systemsflow: Brandon Dunlap of BrightFly up now talking about cloud computing lessons learned.
• mikejwalker: ISACA Risk/Reward Barometer US Edition says that 41% of its survey participants feel that the risk outweighs the reward of #cloud
• theopengroup: Brandon Dunlap, Brightfly, now speaking on “What I’ve Learned in 10 Years of Cloud Computing” // Brandon Dunlap, Brightfly: Are we as security blocking the adoption of a technology that would be hugely beneficial to biz – Cloud?
• mikejwalker: Brandon Dunlap – #cloud limits our visibility in #security controls. I disagree. Often times they are more secure than on-prem
• JWGaus: @mikejwalker #cloud being more secure and having less visibility are not mutually exclusive.
• theopengroup: Dunlap: Workers with a credit card are the new IT department; they are going out and procuring services that you are unable to vet // Dunlap: The weakest link in Cloud security is not technology, it’s the people, mostly those procuring low-cost services = Rogue IT
• systemsflow: Dunlap: Business users with a corporate credit card buying cloud-based services are the new “rogue IT” // Dunlap: Individuals are still the weakest link in security, and especially when using #cloud services / SaaS.
• mikejwalker: Dunlap providing great tips to get in front of cloud security and operational risks
• dave_mcnally: Brandon Dunlap at #ogaus “in many cases they (cloud providers) can do IT better than us”
• mikejwalker: AMR: NA companies are estimated to spend $29.9B on reg compliance and will spend $8.8B this year on technology solutions #entarch
• systemsflow: Big message from BrightFly’s Brandon Dunlap: cloud providers (Dropbox, Google, 37 signals, etc.) need to publish security controls // @bdunlap 1st response to “InfoSec too expensive” argument – save $$ by ditching half your security app portfolio as redundant
• theopengroup: Dunlap: You need to understand the business that your organization is in so you can protect it. Talk to people find their pain points >yes – my point exactly – #entarch is about people first, tech second
• mikejwalker: Ben Franklin – “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”
• systemsflow: Fantastic, practical, and fun presentation by Brendan Dunlap of Brightfly on how to get a handle on #cloud security risks.

• theopengroup: Now listing to Andras Szakal speak about The Open Group Trusted Technology Forum (OTTF)’s accreditation program
• theopengroup: Heading into morning parallel tracks: Architectural View of Security for the Cloud; Business Architecture; Data Quality & SI

• systemsflow: Tony Carrato makes the point of the importance of the process to make and record architecture decisions. // Carrato: Record architecture decisions and solve a problem only once.
• systemsflow: UDEF = framework to build a metadata-based data architecture for your biz that stands a chance of interoperating w/others
• systemsflow: UDEF IDs like Dewey decimal #s for objects & their attributes #entatch
• systemsflow: Surprising that UDEF has only 2 adopters & 1 is @theopengroup. Interoperability needs numbers
• systemsflow: Interactive architecture decision session led by Carrato and @omkhar.  Skills building at #ogaus // UDEF mapping exercise forces a deliberate, repeatable normalization of data models
• systemsflow: UDEF success use case: multinational merger, convert Chinese HR system to US easy if both already UDEF-mapped #entarch

• theopengroup: Sitting in on #BizArch track: Kevin Daley of IBM discussing Business Architecture Building Blocks //Big audience today for the Business Architecture track.. a discipline whose time has come, perhaps? Forum has formalized a definition
• practicingEA: RT @theopengroup: Big audience today for the Business Architecture track.. an idea whose time has come #forrester agrees
• systemsflow: IBM’s Kevin Daley: A well-defined biz arch covers strategy, technology, & operations domains + governs their intersection. >oops… this looks suspiciously like an (incomplete) #entarch definition, not a #bizarch one…
• systemsflow: Kevin Daley: You [inadvertently?] change your biz strategy every time you budget by choosing where you spend.
• visualmodeling: Daley: “Organizations will have a cultural affinity to a specific biz arch perspective.” // Yes!  Use the capabilities you have!!
• theopengroup: Daley’s BizArch track: Now capturing audience observations and reactions about the #bizarch building blocks
• systemsflow: Daley: Biz architecture evolves holistically – no one stops doing business for a year to develop their biz architecture.
• LarsHouge: Could it be a good idea to include an information architect in the work related to the Business Architecture Method Framework? >sounds wise… and maybe even some business-architects too?
• systemsflow: Nice reminder during Q&A: Importance of accepting and not debating feedback when seeking feedback.
• LarsHouge: The BA definition was good, but it seems like the Method Framework is less mature, ex. a clear link to the BMM stuff. #entarch
• systemsflow: Interesting #bizarch Q&A comment: Biz arch is as much about connections between orgs as about the orgs themselves. #stillparsing >this is news…?!?
• systemsflow: Another comment in the #bizarch track. Let’s avoid EA landgrabbing and competing with MBA-type biz strategy field. >yep – for biz-strategy, EA is decision-support, not decision-making
• krismeukens: RT @systemsflow avoid #entarch landgrabbing & competing w MBA-type #biz strategy #bizarch < circular rather than linear causality
• systemsflow: Interesting #bizarch debate during Q&A.  Does #EA = #bizarch + #techarch?  Or does #bizarch include technology as well? >oh not, not again… this is positioning bizarch as entarch – which it isn’t!

• theopengroup: More post-lunch tracks: Security Architecture, Business Architecture, TOGAF/SOA

• systemsflow: Sitting in with Gail Wright and Peter Haviland on getting started with business architecture. #bizarch
• systemsflow: Wright/Haviland: The #bizarch focus is at the intersection of Strategy, Operations and Technology. >oops… that’s not a good start… implies business-centric ‘EA’ rather than a proper separation of bizarch and #entarch
• systemsflow: For #bizarch approach, as in all things except elastic waist pants, one size does not fit all!
• systemsflow: Q: What do biz leaders expect from #bizarch? A: Nothing, because they don’t know what it is. (Because we can’t tell them!) >yes, that’s painfully obvious. and OpenGroup and the big consultancies have consistently screwed things up by presenting bizarch as ‘something to do with IT’, when in reality it barely touches IT at all… ::sigh::
• systemsflow: Governance unwrapped: Whoever controls the purse, in truth makes the architecture decisions. #bizarch >that may be ‘business-reality’, but it’s really, really dumb: what happens if ‘whoever controls the purse’ doesn’t understand the context?
• systemsflow: Haviland: “Sitting around white boarding is not architecture.” #bizarch  // Yes! Don’t confuse motion with progress. >having proper conversations around a whiteboard with real implementors is architecture, ‘motion’ without agreed direction is not…
• systemsflow: Make sure what you architect is implementable and implemented. #bizarch >yep – that’s what those whiteboard conversations are for…

• systemsflow: Iver Band: Modeling needs of RBAC met using the strengths of #SABSA, #TOGAF, and #ArchiMate.  Use of multiple tools shown at #ogaus.
• systemsflow: Trulove from Sailpoint: #Cloud allows biz the opportunity to “go rogue” and avoid IT. Future audit woes brewing? >yup…

• theopengroup: Rounding out the day with more tracks: Digital Identity, Business Architecture and #SOA

• systemsflow: Sitting in with Mieke Mahakena & Erik Proper to discuss the role of the business architect. #bizarch
• systemsflow: Mahakena/Proper: biz architects focus on broad view of operations; biz analysts focus on solution-specific reqs. What do you think? >agree – as long as analysts are not solely assumed to be ‘part of IT’
• systemsflow: Great insight from Len Fehskens: For any architect, it’s less about what you know and more about what you know how to do. #bizarch >…and who you know who can (help you to) do what you don’t know how to do

• LarsHouge: Influencers-ends-bus capabilities-means-tech capabilities-ABB’s-SBB’s. Certified, but still a little bit frustrated… Need beers.
• CH_FEDARCH: @LarsHouge Might “lessen” – add? – frustration: Capabilities should be treated ABBs, for they’re not “Detail”, but rather ‘Gestalt’ // Additionally, usefulness of those concepts depend on “planning mode”: “Strategy4Direction” or “Strategy4Implementation”

• togaf_r: Official ArchiMate resource:online spec – mobile edition at http://ow.ly/5IS1G #entarch #itarch #archimate
• togaf_r: Read the smartphone/tablet friendly edition of TOGAF on our mobile site http://ow.ly/5ISv4 #entarch #itarch #togaf

—-

• theopengroup: Welcome to Day 3 of The Open Group Conf/Austin. No plenary; going into tracks #Cloud Roadmap/Strategy; ArchiMate, Aligning IT and Biz // The program for today’s conference is available at http://ow.ly/5EVl5 and on the mobile site at http://ow.ly/5EVmK

• systemsflow: Mark McCormick kicking off Business Alignment Track talking about IT Transformation. #bizalign
• systemsflow: Defined business strategy is a prerequisite to IT Transformation.  Can’t hit the target if you can’t see it! #bizalign
• systemsflow: Mark McCormick shows that the Starbucks value map drives sbux arch decisions.  Mark is speaking @systemsflow language! #bizalign
• systemsflow: McCormick: “making pictures to show the business” a critical part of the IT #bizalign process. // We are grokking!
• systemsflow: McCormick: Discussing the importance of a IT charge-back model, or at the very least, IT cost visibility to the business. #bizalign

• systemsflow: Bill Cason beginning his talk on #bizalign at #ogaus
• systemsflow: Bill Cason: Biz arch benefits – improve IT portfolio/execution as well as biz performance/model #bizalign
• systemsflow: Cason: Use a “capability lens” on your application portfolio to have a fact-based discussion with the biz. #bizalign
• systemsflow: Cason’s capability map clearly shows if IT investments align with biz needs #bizalign
• systemsflow: Assets are the lang of IT; capabilities the lang of biz.  #bizalign must provide Rosetta stone for IT to talk to biz.

• systemsflow: John Dohm: We need to move away from IT being a silo to IT being an integral part of the business. #cloud // Yes! But why haven’t we?
• systemsflow: Dohm: IT consumers will drive adoption of cloud services; IT will be left cleaning up after them. #cloud // Get agile or move aside!

• systemsflow: Gloria Killen of Intel: Biz strategy drives EA principles. EA principles drive IT building codes
• systemsflow: Bill Brierley of TRM Technologies:  “Whenever you put an EA program in place it is a fundamental shift.” Culture shock poses problems
• systemsflow: Ken Street: #KM and #EA are at similar levels of maturity [acceptance?] within orgs – struggling for full value equation buy-in.
• systemsflow: Brierley: EA is about recognizing the collective wisdom of your org. It requires a key set of soft skills that not everyone has.
• systemsflow: Your #entarch repository is like a garden that requires constant cultivation. Street: Reuse, Reduce, Recycle

• theopengroup: Going into afternoon tracks: #Cloud #EA & Deployment; Agile Business Architecture; #TOGAF 9 Case studies. Impressive speaker lineups

• theopengroup: Sitting in on Stephan Amsbary’s interesting presentation on the US power grid and an associated #TOGAF case study
• theopengroup: Amsbary: evolving to a smart grid, pervasive computing that includes billions of devices, monitoring by tens of 1000s of applications

• theopengroup: Now sitting in on TOGAF 9 Case Study: eGovernmental Services and Public Investments in Norway by Lars Christian Houge
• theopengroup: Houge: Norway decided on TOGAF to help it a change concept with the highest possible economic returns and best use of public funds
• togaf_r: Houge: TOGAF and the ADM gave us a “kick-start”, common vocabulary, common understanding, roles and responsibilities

• theopengroup: Final tracks of the day coming up: Holistic #EA; Paths to Creating Successful #Cloud Computing Solutions. OR: #TOGAF Camp!

• BalajiPrasad_: “takes an org to deliver on EA.  An Architect’s role is no more important than an analyst, manager, etc.” – Tim Barnes #ogaus #EA
• BalajiPrasad_: “#EA is not well understood outside of #architecture teams” – Chris Forde.  So he prefers “strategy”, “planning” etc. with others.

And a handful of follow-up summaries and pointers to presentations:

• davidcbaker: Thanks #ogaus for a great conf. My talk on biz driven arch is also available on Slideshare http://slidesha.re/nufyne #entarch #bizarch
• mikejwalker: OpenGroup Austin: on keynotes Day 1 http://bit.ly/r5eC14 Day 2 http://bit.ly/oG50nr #entarch #bizarch
• mikejwalker: The New World of Enterprise Architecture–From IT Arch to EA Presentation  http://bit.ly/p5TDIs #entarch #bizarch

The highlight, though, was a stream of great conversations on enterprise-architecture.

The first of these was with Nick Gall and Bard Papegaaij from Gartner, and independent-consultant Richard Veryard. As usual, I failed to take notes… apologies. But probably the key theme throughout was the shift away from IT-centrism: Nick with his concept of the panarchy double-cycle applied to architecture, as ‘panarchitecture‘; Bard with a strong emphasis on architecture in government, and on emotional-intelligence and human factors (the latter with some strong parallels to my own themes around ‘enterprise as story‘ and ‘enterprise as language‘); and Richard on expanding out to a broader concept of ‘organisational intelligence‘. There was also quite a bit of discussion on whether the panarchy-cycle of creation, exploitation, collapse and rebuild, could be applied to Gartner’s own ‘hype-cycle‘: Nick was adamant that it couldn’t and shouldn’t, but Richard and I both felt that perhaps it could – particularly if we see the hype-cycle as two iterations of a panarchy-cycle, with the hype-cycle’s collapse into the ‘trough of disillusionment’ representing the second half (‘destruction’) of the first of those panarchy-cycles. A discussion for another time, perhaps?

We followed through on the next day with a stream of what ended up as mostly one-on-one discussions: Richard was presenting at the Open Group conference and could only drop by for a few minutes, whilst Nick and Bard had speaking-slots at Gartner that were almost back-to-back.

With Bard, the conversation started around the work by his late wife Michal, linking the native-American model or metaphor of the Medicine Wheel, and how those concepts can be applied in a business context.  In some ways this parallels my own architectural use of the traditional Five Elements model, and also some Jungian-style concepts that I’ve used for many a year, though Michal’s ideas seem to go into even further depth. (We’d planned to meet up at their home in Brisbane earlier this year, and had all been greatly looking forward to it; but we’d had to postpone at the last minute, because she became very ill, and sadly that meeting never took place. A huge loss not just to Bard but – from what I’ve seen so far – a huge loss also to all of us in enterprise-architecture, I suspect. Oh well.)  Very interesting, anyway, and I hope at least some of it will surface as a Gartner Note or the like from Bard in the relatively near future.

Another key part of the discussion with Bard was the relationship between agility and stability, somewhat as described in my previous post ‘Agility needs a backbone‘. The hypothetical example that we explored – based on real-world contexts which we’ve both worked – was the classic clash between bureaucrats and politicians in a government department. The blunt fact is that few politicians can see beyond the short-term: they need to deliver quick results of some kind to convince the electorate that they’re doing something of value. That means that they demand agility, to change everything ‘now!’ – which soon leads to a horribly fragmented architecture, with all manner of half-completed projects pulling in all manner of different directions. By contrast, the bureaucrats crave certainty, stability – and they often do hold a true long-term view, albeit often an over-cautious one. Caught between these two opposing forces are the project-managers and process- and IT-system developers, who somehow have to sort out the resultant mess. The way out seems to be an architecture based on some variant of the backbone – which keeps the bureaucrats happy – providing consistency and support for a myriad of smaller agile projects out on the edge – agile enough to keep the politicians happy. The two types of implementations need different emphases: the agile side typically thrown together as ‘shadow IT’, whilst the core follows a more ‘traditional’ waterfall-style cautious-change model with much tighter governance. New services feed outward from the core, enabling new agile-style ‘mashups’ – the many GIS-linked ‘citizen services’ being a good example of this. And some of those quick-win services will also slowly migrate into the core. But in terms of dependencies, it’s a kind of spoke-and-hub relationship: in general, services from the core should never be allowed to break anything – especially not without warning – whereas there would often be no guarantees at all for relationships between agile-services out on the edge. This approach would give us a unified form of governance across the whole agile/waterfall spectrum – and a lot more certainty for the developers who’ve too often been caught up as pig-in-the-middle.

Then to the follow-up meeting with Nick Gall. Much of this was a review of what Bard and I had discussed earlier, but there were also two key points that arose from a brief review of my ‘Enterprise Canvas‘ model-type (from my book Mapping the enterprise). One point was a link-up between my understanding of the tension between ‘vision’ and the real-world, that drives the architecture, compared to one of Nick’s own models of architecture as a kind of wasp-waisted ‘double-funnel’ between near-infinite possibilities and near-infinite implementations, with architecture as the ‘waist’ where constraints for key choices are identified and applied. To me, everything in the enterprise is like a cone, extending downward from the single point represented by the vision. But as Nick pointed out, architecture describes a structure that could in principle be used for a very wide range of different purposes – in other words, similar structures that can support different enterprise-visions. The ‘cone’ represented by a layered Enterprise Canvas would thus be one instance of the range of possibilities of purpose represented by the upper-half of Nick’s double-funnel, selected out by that specific vision; a different vision could well lead to an almost identical-seeming implementation below the ‘waist’ of the double-funnel. Hence why reference-architectures and commoditised-services and suchlike do actually work in practice – even though they’re linked to different enterprise-visions.

The other point was an easy way to resolve the age-old argument about architecture versus design. They’re actually part of the same spectrum from vision to realisation, from ‘why’ to ‘how’ and so on. The only difference between them is which way they face: architecture tends to face ‘upward’, towards the big-picture,  the vision, or ‘why’, whilst design tends to face ‘downward’, towards the detail, the real-world realisation, the how and who and where and when and with-what. So in practice, almost no-one is ever solely and architect or designer: everyone will do at least some of both. What makes it confusing at times is that the ‘architect’ orientation at a detail-layer – a solution-architect or application-architect, for example – will usually have a narrower scope than someone nominally working in higher-layer business-design or process-design. Once we realise it’s the same spectrum, it makes things a lot easier to explain: the difference between architect and designer is one of orientation – ‘up’, or ‘down’ – on that spectrum, more than one of position in terms of Zachman-style layers. Architects mostly architect, and designers mostly design; yet the two roles will always meet somewhere within each person on that spectrum.

Next was a meetup with a director of the vendor of a mid-range enterprise-architecture toolset. I won’t say which vendor it was, for confidentiality reasons, but to me this was important: perhaps the first toolset-vendor to really ‘get’ the nature of whole-of-enterprise architecture, and the support that it needs from the the architecture-toolset. Like almost all of the vendors, they’ve come up from an IT-oriented base, and that’s still the core of their toolset; but they do understand about how all of that links upward into strategy and vision, and horizontally across the non-IT aspects of the enterprise – people and machines and non-IT assets and the like. Nothing else to report just yet, but definitely a Watch This Space, I think?

Leaving the Gartner conference-venue, a very brief meeting with two of the new generation of whole-enterprise architects, Gerold Kathan and Ondrej Galik. I had to run to catch a train at that point, so only enough time to talk whilst crossing Westminster Bridge, but good to know that the future of the field in Europe seems already to be in capable hands.

And likewise in Latin America. The last of this stream of meetings this week was with Roberto Severo, lead for the Brazil chapter of AOGEA (Association of Open Group Enterprise Architects). We met first at the Open Group conference-venue – I didn’t go to the conference itself, for reasons I’ve explained earlier. A long, rambling walk-and-talk through central London, covering a very wide rantge of enterprise-architecture topics – in particular, how to expand and embed whole-enterprise architecture ideas and techniques in the Latin market. One of the best ways to do this will be through a stronger emphasis on values, which aligns better with Latin culture than it does to, say, British or (especially) US business-culture, where – as I’ve discovered to my cost – it’s often very hard to get business-folks to understand any concept of value beyond money or the near-mythical ‘shareholder-value’. There’s still a constant struggle to combat the baleful influence of IT-centrism in enterprise-architecture (and I’ll have to be blunt here and say that for the most part the Open Group and most of the big consultancies are really not helping us in this… ), but it’s probably somewhat easier to resolve this in Latin America than in mainstream ‘Western’ cultures. We’ll see: but it certainly looks like an interesting year ahead.

Interesting times, anyone?

But this time I’m not going. Sorry.

A bunch of different reasons, really.

One is that it’s become just that much too expensive. The full three-day conference is priced at well over a thousand pounds; even a single-day pass is something like four hundred. Sure, that’s not so much for a large corporation to pay, even in these cash-strapped times: but for a solo consultant that’s a serious amount that needs to be weighed against everything else. I’ve been to a fair number of Open Group conferences over the past few years, but to be honest the only way I’ve been able to afford it has been that they’ve allowed speakers to go in at the Member rate, which used to be something like a third of the price. Yes, in principle, I could save money by joining, and getting the Member rate the proper way: but again, that’d be several thousand pounds a year, because Open Group still only support a per-organisation membership, with no allowance at all for small companies or individuals. And to be blunt, I object strongly to Open Group’s notion that it’s ‘fair’ that an individual should have to pay the same membership-fee that’s paid by the whole of IBM: somehow OG still don’t seem to grasp that I and the many other solo-consultants in this space would literally be getting far less than a thousandth of the per-person value for our membership-money…

Which brings me to the second reason: I do enjoy those conferences, yet I’m really not getting much value for money there any more. The Open Group conferences are great if you’re into IT-architecture – which I’m not. IT-architectures are right out on the fringes of the work I do these days, which is mostly about the architecture of the enterprise as a unified whole. Open Group do of course insist that they’re doing ‘enterprise-architecture’, with TOGAF and the like: but in reality it’s still only enterprise IT-architecture – which is not the same thing at all. And whilst it’s true that there’s a been lot more mention of business-orientation in the descriptions for the past few conferences, in practice it’s clear that it’s still little more than a surface veneer on top of the same old IT-centrism. Which I suppose is fine, in its way, for IT-folks, but it doesn’t have much business relevance – let alone relevance at a true enterprise scope. To again be blunt, it’s still pushing the EA profession in a direction that all but guarantees business-irrelevance, and reinforces still further the infamous ‘business/IT-divide’ – which doesn’t help anyone in the longer term. I’ve had a lot of value from those conferences in the past; but in reality that value has mainly been to clarify for me that the Open Group’s version of ‘enterprise’-architecture was pretty much exactly what I’m not doing, and help me hone my understanding and explanation of what I am doing instead.

Open Group’s focus and heritage are all about IT standards and IT-architectures. Which is fine: someone has to do that, I’m very glad that someone does do that, and to me there’s no doubt whatsoever that Open Group do it very well indeed. Yet their involvement in enterprise-architecture has been more like an historical accident, a scope that grew and grew far beyond IT because the reality is that that’s the only way it would it work. Their natural reflex, though, is to keep trying to force it back into the IT-domain, where it frankly does not belong: enterprise IT-architecture is important in its own right, and is also important as one aspect of whole-enterprise architecture, but it is not the whole of EA! And now that there are other less IT-centric EA conferences, such as Integrated EA and IRM-EAC, it’s clear that I’m likely to have better value for my ‘conference-buck’ there than at yet another IT-only Open Group conference.

(There’s one aspect of enterprise-architecture, though, that fits right within Open Group’s chosen remit of ‘boundaryless information flow’ and that urgently needs their attention: standards for information-exchange between enterprise-architecture toolsets, preferably covering the span of the whole of the ‘toolset-ecosystem‘. Open Group have had a preliminary standard for this languishing on the back-blocks for half a dozen years or more: is there any chance it could revived and brought up to date?)

I’ll next be speaking on whole-enterprise architectures at AE Rio 2011 in Brazil next week, and at IRM-EAC 2011 in London in early June. If you’re going to either of those conferences, perhaps see you there?

And for Open Group London, and probably for other EA conferences as well, is it perhaps time to revive that fine old tradition of the ‘fringe festival’ – where those who don’t fit in with the criteria for the formal festival get a chance to showcase their work as well? Several folks have happily suggested that around the IRM-EAC conference we could have a ‘#nottheeac‘ meetup, complete with its own ‘official beer’ (London Pride, of course!); perhaps we could organise a ‘#notoglon‘ EA fringe-festival as well?

Either way, if you’re going to Open Group London and you’d like to meet up, just drop me a line: I’ll be around. Just not at the conference itself.