Counting Down to Book Launch

1
2 years ago
by John Gøtze in

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.

More Book Reviews

1
2 years ago
by John Gøtze in ,

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

0
2 years ago
by John Gøtze in

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’ defining 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

0
3 years ago
by John Gøtze in

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.

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