This has been a great week, for several reason, but most notably because our book, Coherency Management: Architecting the Enterprise for Alignment, Agility and Assurance, is now in AuthorHouse’s hands and should be ready for ordering very soon. On the book’s website, we have published the Table of Contents and a chapter overview, and also some endorsements. And some background interviews with the editors (here’s the interview with me).

The book introduces the idea of Coherency Management, and asserts that this is the primary outcome goal of an enterprise’s architecture.

Editors of the book are Gary Doucet, John Gøtze, Pallab Saha, and Scott Bernard. With submissions from over 30 authors and co-authors, the book reinforces the idea that EA is being practiced in an ever-increasing variety of circumstances – from the tactical to the strategic, from the technical to the political, and with governance that ranges from sell to tell. The characteristics, usages, value statements, frameworks, rules, tools and countless other attributes of EA seem to be anything but orderly, definable, classifiable, and understandable as might be hoped given heritage of EA and the famous framework and seminal article on the subject by John Zachman over two decades ago. Notably, EA is viewed as an Enterprise Design and Management approach, adopted to build better enterprises, rather than a IT Design and Management approach limited to build better systems.

We will use the coherencymanagement.org website not just to promote the book, but also to be a platform for continued dialogues about coherency management and for publishing further studies. We’re especially interested in relevant case studies, and have published one such: Neil Kemp’s interesting case study about Winnipeg Fleet Management.