Tree Huggers’ Enterprise Architecture

 Tree Huggers’ Enterprise Architecture

“If you can’t explain it in a simple way, you do not understand it”

– Richard Feynman

There are over 80 different Enterprise Architecture Frameworks. All of them have failed at least once, some of them failed many times. There is no silver bullet among them to reliably produce Enterprise Architecture for your company to:

  • Align the IT Strategy with the Business Strategy
  • Reduce Information Technology complexity
  • Make the silos work together for the benefit of the whole

One of the notable features of the popular Enterprise Architecture Frameworks is that it kills trees:

There must be a way to save the trees and come up with a framework that is brief, yet actionable, and practical. To construct a methodology that does not require expensive consultants to decipher the rules, and thousands spent on weeklong certification courses to reach “associate” level competency.

So, here is framework #81, the single page methodology called the Tree Huggers’ Enterprise Architecture:

To start, the following DESIGN OBJECTIVES have been established:

  • Single page
  • Data model and process decoupled
  • Coherent,  necessary, strong semantics
  • Actionable
  • Outcomes of the framework are meaningful to the IT partners
  • A good architect should be able to explain it to, and turn the departmental admin into a believer in 60 minutes

The first PROCESS diagram outlines the major activities of the typical IT shop including governance, strategic planning, project portfolio and project management, assurance, asset management and service management:

The second diagram shows the DATA MODEL which is somewhere between conceptual and logical. Every table corresponds to one or many artifacts (Excel or Word) to be created. Clicking on the table names will open the web pages with the corresponding artifacts.

Connectors capture the dominant relationships between the tables. Semantics is consistent across the fields of the different tables. The direction of the arrows guide the process (e.g. first identify the stakeholders, and then document their strategies). If you run the model through a network analysis tool, you will be able to measure the nodes’ importance, calculate metrics like connectedness, betweenness, and set the implementation priorities according.

This meta-model is a fusion of somewhat overlapping concepts from TOGAF (Technology Standards, Capabilities, Layers of Business, Information, Application and Technology), IEEE 1471 (Stakeholders, Concerns, Architectural Views), GEAF (Environmental Trends, Business Strategy, Principles, Technology Roadmaps), FEA (Technical Reference), Zachman (Direct Mapping to Artifacts, Separation of Customer and IT Perspectives), ITIL (Service Portfolio and Catalog) and PMBOK (Portfolio and Project Management):

Finally here is the ACTIONABLE PLAN. This resource loaded project plan is the exact 1 to 1 mapping of the data model with delivery dates, durations, dependencies and resources. Once the components are established, they go into maintenance cycles, so the project plan will extend into the future:

Now that the Single Page Framework is ready, you will only need architects who:

  • Combine social and cognitive intelligence
  • Possess technical and business knowledge
  • Communicate well and frequently
  • True Jedi Masters of Cialdini’s Six Principles
  • The Force is with them, or at least they have a powerful sponsor

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