GotzeBlogged
Enterprisey thoughts – John Gøtze
More Book Reviews
Apr 3rd
Overall: I recommend the following three books.
In Advances in Government Enterprise Architecture, my good friend Pallab Saha over in Singapore has made a seminal compilation of 18 chapters on government enterprise architecture written by practitioners and practicing academics from Australia, Germany, Greece, Ireland, The Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea, United Kingdom, and United States of America. Several of the contributing authors also have chapters in the Coherency Management book that Pallab and I, together with Gary Doucet and Scott Bernard, are releasing very soon.
If I should emphasise one chapter from the book, it has to be Pallab Saha’s own chapter about Singapore’s e-government initiative and the Methodology for AGency ENTerprise Architecture (MAGENTA), “a rigorous, disciplined and structured methodology for development of agency enterprise architectures that enables agencies to align to and fully support the government’s transformation objectives and outcomes”. Very interesting read.
With its 502 pages, Advances provides a very solid view on governmental EA. It is a perfect book for students and researchers of e-government and governmental EA, alas its cost ($195 at Amazon) means that the students have to wait for their libraries to get the book. This is without doubt the reference book for government EA.
In Enterprise Governance and Enterprise Engineering, Dr. Ir. Jan A.P. Hoogervorst from Sogeti in the Netherlands presents a competence-based perspective on governance, where “employees are viewed as the crucial core for effectively addressing the complex, dynamic and uncertain enterprise reality, as well as for successfully defining and operationalizing strategic choices”. Hoogervorst sees enterprise engineering as “the formal conceptual framework and methodology for arranging a unified and integrated enterprise design, which is a necessary condition for enterprise success”.
Hoogervorst defines Enterprise architecture as “a coherent and consistent set of principles and standards that guides enterprise design,” and he argues that EA is a communicative bridge between the functional and constructional perspectives, that is between a functional, requirements-oriented, black-box system perspective and a constructional, realization-oriented, white-box perspective. I like Hoogervorst’s approach to EA. It’s neither IT-centric nor business-centric; if anything, it’s enterprise-centric.
The last chapter is about a fictitios case, an energy company. While this certainly helps in understanding enterprise governance and enterprise design in practice, it is in my opinion still leaving the reader with unanswered questions about enterprise engineering. As if Hoogervorst or Springer ‘forgot’ some additional chapters of the book. Or maybe it’s just a ‘cliffhanger’ to forthcoming books? Hoogervorst’s book is the second to be published in Springer’s Enterprise Engineering Series (I reviewed the first book in the series back in December). This series is aimed at academic students and advanced professionals. I’ll certainly recommend Hoogervorst’s book to my students.
The third book I’ll talk about here has been on my book shelf for a while, as it was published in November 2007, and I bought it right away, but must admit that it didn’t really catch me on the first reading back then. Recently, I was prompted to pick it up again, and am actually happy I did.
In Lost in Translation (book’s site), Nigel Green and Carl Bate from CapGemini describe a simplified ‘language’ for preventing loss in translation from business needs to IT solutions. This language is called ‘VPEC-T after the five dimensions it focuses on: Values, Policies, Events, Content and Trust. VPEC-T is presented as a common language that is natural for both business and IT, and is “straightforward enough to use, yet sophisticated enough to work in today’s connected world.”
Subtitled “A handbook for information systems in the 21st century”, the authors do not hide their interests: They provide a tool (‘language’) for how IT-people can become better at capturing what the business wants from IT. In this sense, it’s classic Information Systems thinking (chapter 2), and VPEC-T does indeed come across as, yes, yet another IS-approach. But also, as one that may well take some IS-territory, perhaps especially from IS-practitioners. I will certainly follow VPEC-T. I follow @taoofit on Twitter. I’ve also joined the VPEC-T Google Group. Also, google the acronym and you’ll find a few good things by adopters of it, for example the VPEC-T mindmap which seems quite useful.
Agility Utility and Dense Clouds
Mar 17th
I had the pleasure of supervising Adrian Sobotta on his Master Thesis (PDF) titled Enhancing the Agility Promoting Benefits of Service-Orientation with Utility Computing.
Abstract: Enterprises have been exploiting the agility improving abilities of information technology heavily in the last decade. The problem of lacking agility is especially important in today’s environment which has an overwhelming characteristic of ‘change’ deï¬ning it. As such, a number of enterprise aligning uses of information technology have been proposed by both academia and practitioners. One such use is the implementation of service-orientation that promotes loose coupling and reusability among other highly desirable agility drivers. This Master ’s thesis proposes an extension to the service-orientation design paradigm to include cloud based utility computing. This new design paradigm stands to promote enterprises level of agility higher than was possible before with ‘traditional’ service-oriented architectures alone. Download (PDF).
Highly recommended!
Enterprise Architecture Books of 2008: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Jan 9th
I wanted to follow up on my 2009 book post with one looking back at EA-books of 2008. I’ve however been waiting for some of them, but those I got the other day, and have now been checking them out. From what I count, 2008 gave us 9 EA-books. That is, books about enterprise architecture. Published in 2008. Did I forget any books on that list?
Without further ado, here is my highlights of 2008:
The Good
Jaap Schekkerman‘s Enterprise Architecture Good Practices Guide: How to Manage the Enterprise Architecture Practice is a clear winner.
At 386 pages, Schekkerman’s Guide is based on IFEAD‘s EA guides published over the years, and is one big EA-goodie-bag for organizations that seek guidance in initiating, developing, using, and maintaining their EA practice. Schekkerman’s Primer does a good job at covering contemporary EA practice.
This is his third book. It much better than the two previous ones. Which weren’t bad.
But speaking of bad:
The Bad
Jeff Handley’s “Enterprise Architecture Best Practice Handbook: Building, Running and Managing Effective Enterprise Architecture Programs – Ready to use supporting documents bringing Enterprise Architecture Theory into Practice” claims that it “covers every detail, including some missed in other books”, and is presented as a “thorough book”, that “leaves no key process out and completely covers everything …”. In addition, the book “is realistic and lays the foundation for a successful implementation”. At 120 pages! Of which pages 5-66 are hardly readable powerpoint slides with bullet point speakers notes. To add insult to injury, the book is rather expensive.
There is actually a few good nuggests of information buried down in the material, but it’ll be an insult to books to call this a book. The main reson it get two stars out of ten is that I have to be able to score something even lower, see below.
The Ugly
Continuing with books I do not recommend, we have Gerard Blokdijk’s Enterprise Architecture 100 Success Secrets – 100 Most Asked Questions on Enterprise Architecture Definition, Design, Framework, Governance and Integration, which is the joke of the year.
A seemingly random collection of 100 one-pagers from near and far, “the top 100 questions that we are asked and those we come across in forums, our consultancy and education programs”. And then it “tells you exactly how to deal with those questions, with tips that have never before been offered in print”.
I notice that the Bad and the Ugly books are both published by Emereo Pty Ltd. My New Year’s Resolution will be never to buy any of their books again.
2009 – A Year of EA Books
Dec 20th
If you are into EA-books, you can look forward to 2009. There will be at least three books you must read.
We are working hard on getting our book ready for publication. There is still no set date for publication/availability, but we still say ‘early 2009′, and will self-publish the book to speed up the publishing.
Having many contributers, and four strong-willed editors, would have been a challenge on any book project, but since we write about coherency, we have been determined to create a coherent book, and have had many and long discussions in the editor team and with contributors.
If you have read our JEA article, you will have an idea about how we think conherency management. In the book, we have invited world-leading enterprise architects to write up their stories and thoughts about coherency management and enterprise architecture, and have also taken another step in fleshing out our own perspectives on how coherency management should be practised.
Now, shamelessly having promoted my own work first, let me turn to the two other 2009-books you cannot miss. In fact, both of these are available from 1st January, and both can be ordered now.
First one is Business/IT Fusion (book website) by Peter Hinssen. Subtitled “How to move beyond alignment and transform IT in your organization: A practical guide to a new IT,” and nicely bound and printed on glossy and square paper, this book is targeted at practitioners, in both business and IT, and especially the CIO.
The book “provides a roadmap for the journey to completely rethink IT, and transform IT into something radically new”, Hinssen writes, and he argues that it’s time for IT 2.0. Hinssen believes that we should not just be concerned with ‘aligning business and IT’, but that we should be busy integrating IT into the business.
At 276 pages, Hinssen presents the reader with chapters with titles such as: The new CIO: from Robin to Batman; The marketing of IT; Intelligent governance: beyond IT governance; and, Architects of Change: using scenario planning in IT. For a practitioner-oriented book, we get surprisingly much “theory”, with references and all, to the extent that I will have no problems recommending this book in academic circles and to my students. In fact, Hinssens book should be read by all students who like the Ross/Weill/Robertson approach to EA.
But speaking of students, there is a new EA-textbook on the market now: Enterprise Architecture: Creating Value by Informed Governance by Martin Op ’t Land, Erik Proper, Maarten Waage, Jeroen Cloo, and Claudia Steghuis. These are all Capgemini consultants, but also recognised university affiliates in the Netherlands.
The book was created in an effort to develop a textbook for one of the key courses of a Master of Enterprise Architecture program in the Netherlands. At only 145 pages, it is a quite condensed introduction to EA, and I’m not sure how newcomers will take it.
The authors see the role of enterprise architecture as an instrument for governance, and identify seven key applications for enterprise architecture: situation description, strategic direction, gap analysis, tactical planning, operational planning, selection of partial solutions, and solution architecture, enabling informed governance.
Enterprise architecting is seen as a process involving a dashboard giving stakeholders indicators and controls allowing the gain insight into the current state of enterprise, alternatives for the future, as well as the performance of the transformation process(es), and to steer/direct these transformations.
The authors define EA as a “coherent set of descriptions, covering a regulations-oriented, design-oriented, and patterns-oriented perspective on an enterprise, which provides indicators and controls that enable the informed governance of the enterprise’s evolution and success”.
I am not sure I agree with this definition. Strictly speaking, EA is a practice, not just a set of documents. But I do like some of the elements they bring to the table.
As a textbook, I think the authors have made some unfortunate pedagogical choices. Using Pizzeria “Perla del Nord†as the through-running case is a very unenterprisey example. So when we get to stuff like “The mission of the pizzeria is to offer positive influence in the work-life balance of both yuppies and dinkies,” and the like, I get a bit tired.Perhaps because I remember being in a similar situation around five years ago, where I used a flower shop as an example. I learned that a “Very Small Enterprise” can be useful for learning to understand simple modeling and system thinking, but unproductive when entering the “real” enterprise space – and hence, counterintuitive for understanding EA.
I am not very surprised that the authors, coming out of the Dutch EA school, like to talk about decomposition, modeling notations, and using Archimate. Students will here find a fine introduction, but need to go elsewhere if seeking actual, practical guidance. The same goes for the Normalized Architecture Organization Maturity Index (NAOMI), an assessment framework designed to determine an organization’s architecture effectiveness. We get an introduction, but not enough info to apply this NAOMI.
Teachers and advanced learners should check both Hinssen’s book and Op ‘t Land et al’s book out. I continue to use Scott Bernard’s Introduction to Enterprise Architecture, but may reconsider what I use a supplementary books. Maybe Hinssen will end up replacing Ross/weill/Robertson, or at least, supplementing it.
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