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Conway’s Law, formulated in 1968, is today’s entry in The EA Glossary.

Conway is pinpointing our challenge as architects. It is all about communication, but at many levels. Communication is power. Knowledge is power. Architecture is power.

Conway’s law is also expressed as:
In any organization there is one person who knows what is going on. That person must be fired.

That person would be the architect. Or maybe the receptionist.

Phil Windley also twists Conway in subtitling his blog: Organizations Get the IT They Deserve (SM)

You know one when you see one, but what is it??

What is a Framework? [The EA Glossary]

Today’s word in The EA Glossary is Principle. I’ve collected a number of central definitions, which should be worth looking at.

One of my ideas with the glossary blog is of course to create a glossary feed, which would be a decent way to syndicate the content. While I pretty much stick with a standard Typepad setup for the blog, which includes default RSS 1.0 and Atom feeds, I find the default exclusion (or, non-inclusion) of a RSS 2.0 feed wrong, and have added one, so the content is also available in
RSS 2.0 (full content).

Actually, when speaking of principles, and especially architectural such, it is interesting to note how important architectural decisions, such as the choice of syndication format standards – which are directly impacting the customers – seems to be driven by a complex set of principles, but also by pure politics and people/power games.

Ruth Malan and Dana Bredemeyer talks about three guiding principles for enterprise erchitects: the Minimalist Architecture Principle, the Decisions With Teeth Principle, and Connect-the-Dots Principle:

With a minimalist architecture, and connected dots, we can turn to the governance process to provide the teeth that will make the architecture stick.

Did SixApart connect the dots when deciding to exclude RSS 2.0? Did Google show teeth when choosing Atom?

I’ve been looking a enterprise architecture glossaries. I need one, and thought it shouldn’t be necessary to reinvent the wheel. Thought there must be something out there I can steal …

I found a good number of glossaries:

• The CIO Council’s Architecture and Infrastructure Committee’s Terminology, which is included in the Government Enterprise Architecture Framework (GEAF) Components Registry and Repository Version 2.0
• Interoperability Clearinghouse Glossary of Terms
• FEACommunity EA glossary (membership required, but free) is a compilation of acronyms and (very few) definitions. The FEACommunity links page has reference to related glossaries.
• National Business Center EA Team’s glossary
• Commonwealth of Virginia Enterprise Architecture Glossary (Revised 12/28/99)

I am sure there are more out there. Please send links.

Now there is one more: The EA Glossary. I created this (a blog) because I thought it would be handy and maybe even useful, for example, I thought of using it as a “word of the day/week” service. So far, it has only one entry: Line of Sight.

If a few of us working with EA got together, this might fly! It could become a very nice resource, if we could get it going. Let me know if you want to become involved.

I’m the chair of the ICA study group on enterprise architecture. We’ve just finished our third workshop, which I hosted here in Copenhagen with attendees from Canada, US, UK, Netherlands, Korea and Japan. Thanks everyone for making the workshop a success!

We are going to make a survey about EA in government. The target group for this survey will be government officials working with EA (“ourselves”), but we might open up for all interested, or make more surveys.

I have installed phpESP which looks very promising as a survey tool. It allows for quite complex surveys, and seems ideal for our survey.

I have created a basic, open survey:

Survey: Enterprise Architecture in Government.

I invite everyone to respond to the survey, which has two purposes. First, to test the survey tool – so please report any problems faced. Second, to enable registration for future surveys. If you are a government official, you will be invited to respond to the ICA survey.