• 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.

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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.

• togaf_r: TOGAF Resource: The TOGAF 9.1 changes overview and 6 other slide decks are now at http://t.co/Arm40mgA (free PDF) #ogsfo

The link points to the Open Group’s ‘public resources’ website for TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework), which includes the respective slidedecks.

One of those slidedecks is ‘TOGAF Version 9.1 Management Overview‘ [PDF] – which turns out to be an interesting illustration of exactly how IT-centrism creeps into enterprise-architecture…

We’ll start with slide 18 (lower part of p.9):

What is an Enterprise?

• A collection of organizations that share a common set of goals

– Government agency

– Part of a corporation

– Corporation

• Large corporations may comprise multiple enterprises

• May be an “extended enterprise” including partners, suppliers and customers

They don’t give the source for that definition, but it’s one I’ve seen elsewhere – I think it’s used in FEAF, for example. Importantly, this definition explicitly does not regard ‘organisation’ and ‘enterprise’ as synonyms. In my view it doesn’t go far enough in that separation, but at least it’s clear that there is a difference, and that ‘the enterprise’ often extends well beyond the boundaries of ‘the organisation’. In short, so far so good.

Next, look at slide 19 (upper part of p.10):

What is an Architecture?
• An Architecture is the fundamental organization of something, embodied in:
– its components,
– their relationships to each other and the environment,
– and the principles governing its design and evolution.

As they say on the slide, that definition is adapted from ANSI/IEEE Standard 1471-2000, another well-known and much-used reference. Again, so far so good.

But note what happens in slide 20 (lower part of p.10), which purports to bring together those previous two definitions:

What is Enterprise Architecture?
Enterprise Architecture is:
• The organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of the firm’s operating model. [MIT Center for Information Systems Research]
• A conceptual blueprint that defines the structure and operation of an organization. The intent of an enterprise architecture is to determine how an organization can most effectively achieve its current and future objectives. [SearchCIO.com]

Which for me brings up an instant response of  ”Huh? Now wait a minute?”… The SearchCIO definition would make reasonable sense if it wasn’t arbitrarily constrained only to the view of the organisation – not the enterprise, as per that previous definition of ‘enterprise’. And in the MIT definition it’s constrained even further, with an unexplained emphasis on IT-infrastructure and “integration and standardization” – which doesn’t make sense at all.

One slide further on, and without any explanation or justification, we’re suddenly down in classic TOGAF territory, where the foundation for everything is IT-infrastructure, and where ‘Business Architecture’ is ‘anything not-IT that might affect IT’. Oops…

And by the time we get to slide 22 (lower part of p.11), we’re presented with this:

Why Enterprise Architecture?
• Effective management and exploitation of information through IT is key to business success
• Good information management = competitive advantage
• Current IT systems do not really meet the needs of business
– Fragmented, duplicated
– Poorly understood
– Not responsive to change
• Investment in Information Technology
– Focussed on system maintenance
– Tactical developments rather than a strategic plan

All I can say to that is “You what???”… To be blunt, what has any of this got to do with enterprise-architecture, in terms of the definitions of either ‘enterprise’ or ‘architecture’ above? “Some but not much”, is the short answer. To illustrate the point, let’s deconstruct some of those assertions above:

–  ”Effective management and exploitation of information through IT is key to business success” – is it? Can you prove this? Given this arbitrary assertion about the importance of IT, can you show the connection – if any – to either ‘enterprise’ or ‘architecture’? And what do you mean by ‘IT’ anyway?

– “Good information management = competitive advantage” – possibly. But what about government and other organisations for whom ‘competitive advantage’ has little or no priority or point? And what about all the other non-IT issues – such as respect and trust – that might have far greater impacts on ‘competitive advantage’?

– “Current IT systems do not really meet the needs of business” – so what? The same is true of many other business-systems, such as the structure and design of core business models – which, architecturally speaking, would usually need to come before any fix-up of outdated IT-systems.

– “Investment in Information Technology [maintenance focus, tactical]” – again, yes, we know, but so what? The same is likely to be true about almost every other aspect of the enterprise – especially in multi-partner enterprises.

So let’s again be blunt about this: that slide above is best dismissed as mere marketing-puff – a sales pitch for large consultancies who want to sell ‘IT-rationalisation’ programmes to clean up the IT-mess that in all probability they themselves had created in the first place… In practice, there’s so much that’s missing from that ‘Why Enterprise Architecture?’ – such arbitrary and unjustifiable constraints on scope – that it really is all but meaningless. It describes only a tiny subset of the actual scope of ‘the architecture of the enterprise’, but somehow seems to purport that this is the whole. Which would be laughable if it wasn’t such a bad joke – or such a destructive one.

In other words, somewhere between slide 19 and slide 22, we’ve gone from enterprise and business, to a largely-spurious attempt at business-justification for one specific subset of enterprise IT-architecture. The remainder of ‘the architecture of the enterprise’ – especially about anything not-IT – has been erased from the story.

Which is why the TOGAF-style EA story just does not make sense to anyone who’s not already embedded and wedded to an IT-centric view of the world.

If you want to see how and why enterprise-architecture is still such a darned hard ‘sell’ to just about anyone in business, all you need to do is read that ‘Management Overview’. And quietly weep…

Surely by now we can do better than this? Please?

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.

But why all this fuss about business-models and enterprise-architecture? What’s the point about the bottom-line not being the baseline to work from? If everyone’s selling something to someone, is there really any difference between a for-profit and a non-profit business-model? And who would want to go from Business Model Canvas to Archimate, anyway? Is anyone interested in any of this technical stuff?

I suppose it all comes down to this quote from Chris Potts:

The devil is in the detail, but the angel is in the architecture.

People like building business-models. It’s wonderfully abstract, and it’s fun – like playing with model-trains, where the passengers are only imaginary and the trains really can run on time. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) the real world is a bit different from that…

Real-world detail can break the best-looking business-model without even breaking out a sweat. We need to know that detail – or at least have a better sense of that detail – before committing ourselves and others to a lot of hard work and ultimate heartache.

Yet we also need to avoid drowning in the detail – otherwise we’ll never get started. Analysis-paralysis, and all that.

Which is where architecture comes into the picture. Formal discipline, yet without overt formality. Patterns help us break through the problems. We simplify, without being simplistic. And we model to reduce the muddle, to cut through the chaos and complexity of all that devilish detail.

Perhaps even more, it’s about the story: the story of each action, and the story of the enterprise itself. If we get clear on the story, the sensemaking becomes a lot simpler.

As I understand it, architecture comes down to a single idea: everything works better when they work together, in pursuit of purpose, a clear aim in mind. Everything connects with everything else. It’s the detail of how everything connects with everything else, of how we get everything to work with everything else, that I’ve been focussed on here.

A lot of detail, I know: but sometimes that is the nature of the beast. Fact is that architecture isn’t all nice pretty abstracts and nice pretty pictures – sometimes there is a lot of petty picky detail, and sometimes we just gotta face that fact… sorry…

Hope it’s been useful to someone, anyway?

This specific part goes from the business-model downwards, from Business Model Canvas to Archimate, and thence to BPMN, UML and other detail-layer models. (There’s another part needed to link upward, connecting that work back up through Business Motivation Model and the like to the core shared-enterprise, but I’ll have to deal with that in another post.)

As you’ll see, I’ve had to twist Archimate somewhat in a few places, to provide workarounds for its current IT-centrism, but otherwise everything exactly follows the existing standards. The keys that enable and to some extent validate those adaptations are two assertions:

• everything is a service (an assertion supported explicitly by the design of Archimate itself)
• everything is recursive (a principle that enables pattern-based modelling, such as the concept of ‘layers‘ used in Archimate, TOGAF etc)

The ‘how-to’ that follows after the break is the current outcome of a lot of exploration over the past weeks, months and years, a lots of posts and conversations on this blog and elsewhere, and a lot of in-person discussion with a lot of people, many of whom have explicitly asked to remain anonymous. I do believe it’s in a usable state right now, but it should still be regarded as ‘in beta’ at best: use with some caution, and please send me any feedback and suggestions.

In parallel with both Business Model Canvas and Archimate, this may be considered to be under a Creative Commons licence. It’s probably not yet stable enough to attach to a CC license-type in a formal manner, but for now please assume non-commercial, share-alike and attribution-requested for the parts described here.

More after the ‘Read more…’ break, anyway.

Step 1: Develop a business-model

The term ‘business-model‘ here means a semi-detailed overview of what the organisation does in its business with others, and the offers and value-types that are exchanged. A strong recommendation that the model should be developed in the Business Model Canvas format, using the associated methods described and/or summarised in the book Business Model Generation. (The book is currently available in at least 18 languages.)

Here’s an example Canvas from an earlier post:

Identify the flows that take place between the various entities in the model. This example (from the same earlier post) shows only the connections, but also identify and record what would traverse these flows in order to enact the intent of the model:

All of this would typically be developed in a workshop context, or in a cafe-type setting with a notepad or a software toolset such as the BMTBox app.

Step 2: Re-map the overall business-model as related services

Split the Canvas into a core for the organisation that executes the business-model, and separate entities for each of the Customer Segments and Key Partners:

In Enterprise Canvas, each of these would be mapped as nodes (services) in a value-network, all in relation to each other and the the overall vision for the shared-enterprise:

The Business Model Canvas typically shows only the immediate links in the supply-chain or value-network, but in Enterprise Canvas we could also extend the node-relationships as required:

In Archimate, at the highest level, the organisation and its combined business-model can be represented as a single Business Service; the [BMC] Customer Segments and Key Partners can be represented as Business Actor entities, each of whom takes on one or more Business Role positions, and connect to the service presented by the organisation via Business Interface relationships:

Step 3: Expand the detail of the overall business-model

From previous work, we can cross-map the Business Model Canvas onto Enterprise Canvas:

The Archimate specification indicates that a unit exposes functionality externally as a Business Service, but represents internal functionality as a Business Function. In essence, this is a simple recursion: structurally, they are the same – the difference is in in where and how the interface is exposed, for example whether or not the related Business Interface requires an explicit Contract.

The simplest summary is that the overall functionality and relationships represented via a single Enterprise Canvas entity would be depicted in Archimate as a Business Service; but the constituent ‘cells’ within that Enterprise Canvas would be depicted as Archimate Business Function entities:

The Archimate Business Process entity literally does not come into the picture at this level. A business-process is best understood as a pattern of activities that make use of services in some form of choreographed sequence: it is somewhat misleading to describe it as a structure in the same sense as other Archimate entities such as Business Service or Business Interaction, because in essence it’s a structure in time only. The term ‘business process’ tends to be misused as a kind of variant of ‘service’ or ‘function’ or ‘capability’, and all of these terms seem to be used in an arbitrarily interchangeable manner, leading to much confusion in modelling and even in business practice: instead, precise taxonomic distinctions are essential here. In that taxonomy, a service is a combination of function and capability, but for these purposes we can allow ‘service’ and ‘function’ to in effect be synonymous, as summarised above.

Given this, we can re-map the Business Model Canvas  / Enterprise Canvas [EC:] cross-map into Archimate (italics) entities as follows:

• The Value Proposition (EC: value-proposition) is represented by one or more Product entities, with related Value entities.
• We have already mapped the Key Partner and Customer Segment entities as Business Actor / Business Role / Business Interface entities.
• All of the Enterprise Canvas cells are mapped to Business Function entities with appropriate names (default: same names as in Enterprise Canvas); these also represent in part the Key Activities cell of the Business Model Canvas.
• All of the Enterprise Canvas interface cells (customer-relations, customer-channels, value-return; supplier-relations, supplier-channels, value-outlay) also include Business Interaction entities (which may optionally replace the respective Business Function entity), each linked to a Business Interface entity, representing the channels and other interfaces to the overall service.
• Each of the six channels (Business Interface entities) links to one or more Business Object entities, which in turn link to the Business Interface of a Customer Segment or Key Partner; each Business Object may optionally be linked to a Meaning entity.
• Each Business Object entity attached to a customer-channel Business Interface should also be linked to one or more Product entities; the same may optionally apply to Business Object entities attached to the supplier-channel Business Interface.
• The Business Object entities associated with a supplier-channel and value-outlay, or customer-channel and value-return, should be linked by a Contract entity, representing the required relationship between the respective Enterprise Canvas main-channel and back-channel (e.g. Business Model Canvas linkage between Value Proposition, Customer Channel. Customer Segment and Revenue Stream).

In essence, using the suggested sort-of layers described in the previous post ‘Rethinking the layers in enterprise-architecture‘, this represents the content for the ‘Why’ layer, which Archimate describes as the ‘Business’ layer. To a significant extent, the ‘Key Activities’ cell of Business Model belong in the ‘How’ layer (which Archimate at present describes only as the largely IT-centric ‘Applications’ layer), whilst much if not most of the ‘Key Resources’ cell belong in the ‘With-What’ layer (which Archimate at present describes only as the exclusively IT-centric ‘Infrastructure’ layer).

More on that in the next steps. In the meantime, we can summarise the mappings as follows – from the Business Model Canvas for one class of offer (Value Proposition, or Product):

Then to the equivalent Enterprise Canvas for that segment of the overall business-model; and thence to a high-level (‘Business’ layer) Archimate model. [Apologies - I started work on these diagrams, but realised they would probably take an entire day each, and need a blog-post each of their own as well: leave this until later, perhaps?]

Note that this is for one category of offer only, from six categories shown in this overall business-model. The complete business-model for all of the offers in context would be a much larger and more complex Archimate model, even at the ‘Business’ layer only.

Step 4: Expand the Key Activities to Archimate ‘Application’ detail

In Archimate, each Business Function or the like in the Business (‘Why’) layer is supported by (realised via) one or more Application Service entities within the Application (‘How’) layer. We also have the same symmetry on the ‘active structure’ side, with an Application Interface entity underpinning or implementing each Business Role; and, on the ‘passive structure’ side a Data Object representing a more real-world form of a Business Object.

(cc) Open Group

The first point that this tells us is that each of the Enterprise Canvas cells and interfaces and flows will be represented by one or more Application-layer entities in Archimate. That part is straightforward enough.

But here we hit a problem with Archimate, because it assumes that activities at this level will only be enacted by IT. In the current structural assumptions in Archimate, activities that are enacted by real people are pushed upward into the Business layer, whilst activities enacted by non-IT technology (i.e. physical machines) are apparently deemed not to exist at all, or else shoved down into the Infrastructure (‘With-What’) layer.

In principle, every activity could be implemented by any conceivable combination of ‘manual’-process, physical-machine and/or IT. Each of these categories of implementation – human, IT and machine – need to be assessed here as if at the same level, so as to identify the trade-offs between different implementations. We also need to be able to view as if ‘the same’ in development and in disaster-recovery, where – for example – we would switch back and forth between a paper-and-pencil versus an IT implementation of what is functionally the same business-process. But Archimate at present doesn’t allow us to do that trade-off assessment: instead, it assumes that everything can be implemented only by IT. In effect, each of the Archimate entities in this layer is an IT-specific specialisation of a generic entity that does not exist. This is a fundamental flaw in the design of Archimate – and one that we need to resolve before we can use Archimate for the kind of true enterprise-scope assessments needed in reviewing the architectural implications of business-models.

The simplest solution here is to go back and recreate the ‘missing’ generic entities of which the existing Archimate entities in this layer are the IT-oriented specialisations. Given that this layer is about the activities that enact business-functions and business-services, these generic entities could be labelled with an ‘Activity’ prefix:

• Activity Object – generic of Data Object
• Activity Service – generic of Application Service
• Activity Function – generic of Application Function
• Activity Interaction – generic of Application Interaction
• Activity Interface – generic of Application Interface
• Activity Module – generic of Application Component
• Activity Collaboration – generic of Application Collaboration

An Activity Object could perhaps be more accurately described as an ‘Activity Subject’, since it’s the subject of all activities, the entity which will be created, accessed, updated and/or destroyed through the respective activity. Again, note that this is the generic: this entity would usually be specialised in the model, to describe a physical object being worked on, a business-relationship being developed, a data-item being accessed or amended, and so on.

An Activity Module is a somewhat arbitrarily-bounded ‘chunk’ of functionality, described in structural terms (‘active structure’) rather than the action itself. For IT, this would typically be described as a ‘component’ or (somewhat misleadingly) as a ‘service’. For a manual process, a typical ‘chunk’ would be as described in a Work-Instruction (in ISO-9000 terms), or possibly a somewhat more abstract Procedure. For a machine-based process, a more typical ‘chunk’ would be the defined work within a given process at a single machine or workstation or cluster of workstations.

The types of relationships that Archimate permits between these more-generic entities (and hence between their derived specialisations) should remain essentially unchanged.

It may also be useful to include links and references to location – physical, virtual and/or relational. There is no Location entity in the current Archimate standard, but it is expected that one will be included in the upcoming Version 2, so there should be no problems with compatibility there.

A strong recommendation here to use the distinctions between Function and Capability as described in the extended-Zachman model used in conjunction with Enterprise Canvas. A function is a metaphoric ‘place’ where an Activity Object will be accessed or changed, and that summarises the changes that will take place; whereas a capability is the competence and skill-level brought to bear on Activity Objects in order to enact the required changes. In most IT applications, these two aspects are merged together into the one item of functionality, hence the distinctions between them may seem too subtle for some people to notice; but for machines and, especially, for human processes, the distinctions are much more explicit, and very important. The function aspect relates to activity, and hence belongs in this layer, whereas the capability is in effect a type of ‘resource’, and hence belongs more properly in the equivalent of the Archimate ‘Infrastructure’ layer. More on that when we look at the Key Resources section of the business-model, anyway.

I won’t go into more detail here of how to develop the model itself. Instead, refer to any of the Archimate reference-materials – such as the formal Archimate standard, the documentation from the Archimate Foundation, or the free Archi toolset for Archimate – and then adapt using the generics and re-specialisation of entities as summarised above.

Each of the activities summarised in the Key Activities cell in the Business Model Canvas should be represented somewhere in this layer of the adapted-Archimate, linked appropriately to the services in each of the cells in the matching Enterprise Canvas.

Step 5: Expand the Key Resources to Archimate ‘Infrastructure’ detail

We now go down one more level in the architectural recursion.

In Archimate, each Application Function or the like in the Application (‘How’) layer is supported by (realised via) one or more Infrastructure Service entities within the Infrastructure (With-What’) layer. We also have the same symmetry on the ‘active structure’ side, with an Infrastructure Interface entity underpinning or implementing each Application Component; and, on the ‘passive structure’ side an Artifact representing the full concrete form of a Data Object.

(cc) Open Group

The implication here is that each of the Key Resources in the Business Model Canvas should be represented in some way within this layer. But here again we hit up against the current limitations of Archimate, because it assumes that the only relevant resources are those that can be described in terms of IT: devices, networks, system-software and so on. In the current structural assumptions in Archimate, the competencies and skills of real people are somehow pushed upward into the Business layer, whilst any other non-IT technology or physical resources, capabilities and infrastructures are apparently deemed not to exist at all. To be blunt, this is IT-centrism running wild, and presents serious problems for modelling at this layer.

In principle, every activity could be implemented by any conceivable combination of ‘manual’-process, physical-machine and/or IT- which means that we need the respective resources and infrastructures to match and underpin each implementation. As in the ‘How’ layer, each of these categories of implementation – human, IT and machine – need to be assessed here as if at the same level, so as to identify the requirements and trade-offs between different implementations, including those needed for special-cases such as development and disaster-recovery.

But again, Archimate at present doesn’t allow us to do that trade-off assessment: instead, it assumes that everything can be implemented only by IT. Some of the entities in this layer are sort-of generic – Infrastructure Service, Infrastructure Interface, Network, Node, Artifact – but they’re kind of incomplete relative to the full infrastructure/resource set, and it’s clear that, as in the Application layer, they’re intended more to represent IT-specific specialisations of generic entities that aren’t available in the Archimate specification. This is another fundamental flaw in the design of Archimate – and one that, once again, we need to resolve before we can use Archimate for its purported purpose as an enterprise-architecture notation.

Because the IT-centrism here is more implied than overt, resolving this is not quite as straightforward as in the Application layer. Probably our best option here is to re-assess the whole structure from the perspectives of the expanded-Zachman used in Enterprise Canvas: Asset, Function, Location, Capability, Event and Decision. These are mostly self-explanatory, though note that each of these itself expands to cover the full ontological scope:

These categories apply everywhere, yet there are also distinct emphases in each of the Archimate-style layers: Decisions, Events and, to a lesser extent, Functions in the Business layer; Functions and, to a lesser extent, Events, in the Applications layer; and Assets, Locations and Capabilities in this layer.

An Asset can be defined simply as a resource for which the respective service is responsible and can put to use as required. (In this context, there’s no real difference between assets and liabilities, other than in terms of availability, because in essence they’re variations on a theme of resource and responsibility.)

A Capability is the ability to work on specific types of Asset using a specific level of competence and skill. Note that in general, physical-machines can only work at a rule-based skill-level, IT typically at an algorithmic level, but in most cases only humans can act at guideline or principle-based skill-level. Also that almost by definition, physical-machines and IT are unlikely to be much use for working on relational or aspirational assets – a point that is often forgotten in the design and operation of many IT-based CRM systems…

A Location is a node within some type of location-schema. These may be of any asset-type or resource-type, or any combination of these: for example, a room in a building will have both a physical location and a virtual location-identifier; an IT network-node will typically have an IP-address or equivalent, but also at a physical location; an organisational hierarchy is also a relational network; and so on. And whilst time is often referred to as an ‘asset’ or a ‘resource’, it can’t be changed or transformed in the same way as for other assets, and hence is best understood as a type of Location rather than a resource. (An Event may be considered to occur in time, but is not in itself of time: the distinction may seem subtle, but can be very important in practice.)

A network is a schema that describes a set of Location nodes, specific relationships between those nodes, and, often, the types of Assets than can be transferred on pathways of connection between those nodes.

What we could term an infrastructure is thus a clustering of Assets, Capabilities and Locations, often in network-relationships.

This schema enables us to identify how the existing Archimate entities in the Infrastructure layer are somewhat-arbitrary IT-specific specialisations of the underlying generics:

• The Archimate Artifact entity is specified as a virtual-Asset, but can be repurposed to represent any type of real-world Asset.
• The Archimate Infrastructure Service entity can be repurposed to represent the exposed available behaviour (Capability) of any cluster of related Assets, Capabilities and Locations, linked to any Activity Function in the Application Layer.
• The Archimate Infrastructure Interface entity can be repurposed to represent the exposed interface for an Infrastructure Service, as linked to any Activity Interface in the Application Layer.
• The Archimate System Software entity is merely one very specific example of a generic Capability entity.
• The Archimate Device entity represents a type of Asset that can be used in and for specific activities, as ‘active structure’: a hammer, a power-drill, a fork-lift truck and an ordinary ‘dumb’ telephone are each likewise a Device in this sense.
• The Archimate Network, Node and Communication Path entities respectively represent a schema for connections between Location nodes, a node within that schema, and a connection-path through which specific types of Asset may be transferred between nodes.

As in the Application layer, the types of relationships that Archimate permits between these more generic entities and their derived specialisations should remain essentially unchanged.

Again, I won’t go into more detail here of how to develop the model at this layer: instead, refer to the Archimate reference-materials, and adapt that to the generics and re-specialisations of entities as summarised above.

Each of the items summarised in the Key Resources cell in the Business Model Canvas should be represented somewhere in this layer of the adapted-Archimate, linked appropriately to the services in the Application layer, and thence the services and interfaces and the like in each of the cells in the matching Enterprise Canvas.

Step 6: Apply enterprise-architecture disciplines to review the business-model

What we have, as the outcome of this modelling exercise, is a full ‘to-be’ description of the implemented architecture for the business-model. Which means that we can now turn to all the usual enterprise-architecture tools and techniques – TOGAF ADM, VPEC-T, requirements-modelling and the rest – to evaluate and rethink what works and what doesn’t, and what’s needed to make it all work together well.

The question at the initial Business Model Canvas stage was whether the ideas made sense at the business level. The questions here are more about whether it would work in real-world practice, such as:

• What structures, capabilities, skills, equipment does this business-model need?
• What exactly passes between each party in each flow – what are the Business Objects that are transferred and/or changed or exchanged? At what points in each process do these transfers take place? What mechanisms and functions are needed to ensure complete balance across the whole ‘Before’ / ‘During’ / ‘After’ cycle of the whole transaction?
• What structures and so on do we have already for this? What equipment and configurations and the like would need to be repurposed? What impacts would that have on existing operations and existing business-models?
• What kinds of changes do each of the requirements demand – incremental, step-change or breakthrough? Has adequate allowance been made in the risk-assessments for the feasibility or achievability of any required breakthroughs?
• Has sufficient attention been paid to the human aspects of the required business-model, including skills-development, retraining, redeployment and cultural change?
• What intermediate stages would be required, in the transition from ‘as-is’ to ‘to-be’? Has sufficient attention been paid to the probabilities that ‘there’ may not in reality be the same as we expected when we aimed to get there?
• Over what timescales could these changes be implemented? What timescales must apply if the business-model is to be viable?

And so on: the usual stuff, really.

(There are some planned extensions to Archimate to deal with versioning and projects and the like, but I’ll cover that in the next part, that deals more with looking ‘upward’ in the enterprise from the business-oriented view in Business Model Canvas.)

The point here is that this kind of modelling process enables us to do an iterative assessment and reassessment of the idea of the business-model and its real-world feasibility, implications and its implementation, bouncing back-and-forth between top-down (the ‘Why’ of the Business Model Canvas) and bottom-up (the ‘How’ and ‘With-What’ of Archimate’s Application and Infrastructure layers). This is also where enterprise-architects would be directly engaged in the development of business-strategy and its real-world implementation – the ‘seat at the table’ at the CxO level of the organisation that so many EAs seem to desire!

—-

So: that’s a suggested pattern and process for direct ‘translation’ between Business Model Canvas and a more whole-enterprise adaptation of Archimate, using Enterprise Canvas as an intermediate layer. There’s another ‘how-to’ to come, going in the other direction, to link Business Model Canvas ‘upward’ to the shared-enterprise, but that’s it for now.

Many thanks for sticking with it this far, anyway. And over to you, if you would?

[Note: this is a work-in-progress post, not a finished piece - I really do need discussion on this one!]

What’s come up this time is the usual struggle with the so-called ‘architectural layers’ in common EA frameworks such as TOGAF and Archimate:

• Business
• Applications (in Archimate) or Information Systems (in TOGAF)
• Infrastructure

The problem is that, for me, these are ridiculously incomplete, and lead directly to IT-centrism – where IT is deemed to be the sole centre and basis for everything. That IT-centrism what creates most of the much-lamented ‘business/IT-divide’.

The corollary is that, because IT is placed as the centre for everything, and applications only run on IT, everything else has to be lumped into ‘business-architecture’, because it’s the only place it can go. Hence in TOGAF, for example, high-level business-strategy is bundled together with mid-level process and detail-level manual work-instruction, without any kind of distinctions between them, solely because it’s ‘not-IT’. And technology and infrastructure that isn’t computer-based – lorries, fork-lift trucks, assembly-lines, plumbing and wiring and even the buildings within which everything operates – don’t even get a mention anywhere.

This brings serious problems even in IT-specific architectures: for example, how can we usefully describe the overall architecture of a data-centre without mentioning power-supply or cooling or access-pathways? What’s the point of arguing about instant-on virtualization for data-servers if it takes a minimum of six months to construct the building that houses them? How do we describe disaster-recovery processes for when the IT is out of action, when the only metamodels available to us can only describe IT? To anyone doing real enterprise-scope architecture in the real-world, the myopic inanity of IT-centrism gets really frustrating after a while…

Hence why I’ve been ranting and raging so much about the limitations of TOGAF and the like over the past few years. It’s not because I’m ‘anti-IT’ – as some people have dismissed me – but because I’m trying to get things to work in the real world. A messy, chaotic, uncertain world in which IT is often unreliable at best, irrelevant at worst, and which, for the most part, is not centred on IT. Sigh…

So, in short, the conventional concepts of so-called ‘business-architecture’ are an unusable mess, and the ‘application’ and ‘infrastructure’ so-called ‘layers’ are too narrow in scope to make practical sense for anything other than the most IT-centric of IT-architectures. Hence, also in short, not so much useless as probably worse-than-useless for most real-world purposes.

Which means that we need to start again. Properly.

But from where? Using what as the layers?

(Or do we even need layers at all? Is even the idea of ‘layers’ misleading?)

There’s the Zachman layers, of course: Contextual, Conceptual, Physical, Logical, Implementation, Operations. That does make practical sense as a description of the process of change, but perhaps not so much about the architecture itself – the interrelated, interconnected structure of that which is in use.

What about structural-decomposition – from abstract to detail? Well, yes, that’s useful, certainly, but it doesn’t really tell us much more than Zachman does, and doesn’t help us to differentiate between different kinds of ‘thing’ – the distinctions that come up, if somewhat erratically, in Zachman’s columns of What, How, Where, Who, When and Why.

The ‘Why’, though, does lead to another suggestion: Simon Sinek’s principle of ‘start with Why’, and its layering of Why, How and What.

Because if we start with Why, and tweak the ‘What’ slightly to ‘With What’, we end up with an almost exact match to the Archimate / TOGAF layering – but this time a layering that is not IT-centric. And which also lines up with key parts of the Business Model Canvas:

• Why? – about the choices and Value Propositions that drive ‘the business of the business’
• How? – about IT-applications, ‘manual’-processes and any other Key Activities that enact those choices and needs
• With What? – about any machines, equipment, buildings and other infrastructures and Key Resources upon which or through which those activities take place

At first glance this has some parallels to the long-established CapGemini ‘Integrated Architecture Framework‘ [IAF]:

(I have a vague recollection that there’s at least one more EA framework that uses a similar Why / How / With-What structure, but right now I can’t remember whose it is… – my apologies to that person, anyway.)

But if we look more closely at those layers in IAF, it’s clear that they’re just a re-labelling of Zachman layers, with the old TOGAF-style layers sideways-on, and deeper ‘cross-cutting themes’ such as security and governance further behind. (And actually that’s quite a good way to put it – which we’ll come back to in a moment.)

The point here is that if we use that Sinek-style categorisation of Why, How and With-What, we can cover just about anything that’s needed in the architecture: it doesn’t assume that the end-point is only about IT. And it still lines up well to Archimate: hence business-information (linked to Why) is represented in Archimate as a Business Object, its usage in processes (linked to How) is a Data Object, and its physical form (as a With What) is a Representation. Archimate doesn’t as yet have any entity to represent generic ‘physical Thing’ or ‘thing that flows through processes’ – such as we’d need to represent a parcel in a logistics context, for example – but the Why / How / With-What structure makes it easy to understand that Representation, Data Object and Business Object are just IT-oriented specialisations (in the UML sense) of each of the respective generic entities. It works.

But should we use layers at all – especially scope-defining layers such as ‘business’, ‘application’ and ‘infrastructure’? In a sense, the IAF suggests not – any fixed notion of ‘layers’ is misleading. A better way to describe is to say that the ‘layers’ are merely areas of emphasis of attention: we separate those areas in order to ‘black-box’ the internals of an area of scope so as to focus our attention on the interfaces between those areas of attention. The IAF shows a very good way to visualise this, with sets of viewpoints that are in effect orthogonal to each other. The only problem there with the IAF is that, yet again, it constrains the overall scope to IT alone – which renders it too limited for whole-enterprise architecture. If we imagine that, rather than that catch-all column labelled ‘Business’, we could have as many columns as we need – and as many ‘backplanes’ that we might need, equivalent to the existing ‘Security’ and ‘Governance’ but covering all values in context for the enterprise – then something like IAF would make good sense.

I would suggest, though, that that simple categorisation would be a good place to start:

• Why – ‘business’
• How – ‘applications’
• With What - ‘infrastructure’

Use each of these not-quite-layers as a viewpoint for focus into the overall enterprise context, and use an adapted version of Archimate or an equivalent to model both within those ‘areas of interest’ and to explore the connections between them.

Okay, that’s it for now: over to you, if you would?

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?