The Enterprise Architecture Blogosphere Update (July in Review)

Todd Biske writes about our need to stay focused on our customers in a Lesson on Service Management -

"A team whose role was to deliver shared services became more focused on minimizing the number of services provided (which admittedly made their job easier) than on providing what the customers needed. As a result, frustration ensued, consumers were unhappy and were increasingly unwilling to use the services...It is very easy to fall into this trap. A move to shared services is typically driven by a desire to reduce costs, and the fewer services a team has to manage, the lower their costs can be."

Amen, Todd, I've often thought that EA is a particularly customer service oriented function (even if we sometimes have to service our customers by telling them what they don't want to hear.) EA's need to focus more on delivering what our customer's find valuable and less on what we think our customers should find so.

In The over-reaction architecture governance anti-pattern, Eduardo Jezierski pokes a bit of fun at us as EAs by demonstrating some of our flaws - nit picking, crying wolf and thinking we are the smartest people in the room. His 5 rules are very customer-centric: focus, advise, communicate, support and be humble.

Thanks for keeping us grounded, Ed!

Tom Graves continues his multipart exposition on Business Architecture and Enterprise Canvas in Context-space mapping with Enterprise Canvas, Part 4: Rethinking vision bottom-up. In this series he explores "the key concept of the extended-enterprise, used that to summarise the ecosystem in which the organisation operates, and started to model the organisation's value-proposition and business-relationships."

He states, "In enterprise-architecture, we create an architecture about an enterprise, but for an organisation."

I have to really think about Tom's posts - good stuff.

In his post, VPEC-T and Archimate, Adrian Campbell also blogs about Business Architecture, comparing Archimate and VPEC-T, a ‘thinking framework' and a focus on understanding the Values, Policies, Events, Content and Trust perspectives. VPEC-T, "provides a useful language to use when speaking with the business about any strategic change."

In a recent exchange with Adrian, I questioned his use of the term Business Architecture, as a result I am more inclined to think Business Architecture = Enterprise Architecture (it's all about business).

Nick Malik also jumps on the Business Architecture bandwagon this month with, Avoiding Business Architecture Paralysis. In this post he provides six questions a Business Architect should focus on answering when asked to provide insight. Good advice for any early stage architecture project.

Our analyst friends continue to be busy. On CIO.com, Forrester Research requests inputs by asking us how well we understand our business and IT Strategy, a popular topic among EAs. Jeff Scott, also of Forrester asks us, "How Do You Articulate Business Strategy?" in another survey request. Obviously, we know what's on their mind. I'll look forward to the result.

Not as active in the Bloggosphere, I finally found a Gartner EA blog! Bruce Robertson dives into one of my emerging favorite topics, that of Cloud Computing and its impacts on architecture. I'll be posting on this topic soon. In the mean time, if you have a cloud case study, Bruce is asking for it in EA Case Studies.

I find it interesting that both Forrester and Gartner are using blogging as a way to canvas the industry rather than provide opinion -

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