EA is abstract enough to make one contemplating the purpose of business philosophically and detailed enough upon how to achieve operational excellence with artifacts delivery.
EA is a blueprint of the enterprise. EA maintains a body of
knowledge about enterprise structure and purpose, and the use of that knowledge
and experience in guiding and managing change for and within the enterprise ecosystem. So
is EA philosophy or artifact?
Enterprise-architecture
is an expression of a philosophy whose concrete product is artifacts. The
overall outcome of the philosophy and artifacts is the set of structures (in
the broadest sense of structure) in use within the business and enterprise ecosystem.
The underlying
philosophy includes choices on management themes, such as hierarchy versus
flat-organization, change-management style (trade-offs between Waterfall and
Agile), and governance in relation to vision, mission, principles, standards
etc. Direct artifacts ('products') include models and meta-models,
registers/repositories for requirements, risks, opportunities, and issues,
glossary and thesaurus, and governance documents and reports.
(a) art and discipline of designing enterprises
(b) the structural and aesthetic themes that create inter-relationships between elements of the actual enterprise and with the wider market(s) in which it participates.
(c) EA was elevated at the rank of strategy, because of its potential role in the
It’s logical to see
architecture being understood as a philosophy as EA is a blueprint of the business.
It can be very powerful when dealing with problems more systemically through EA.
"Architecture" as a human pre-occupation (as in an association with
the verb architecting" rather than an "architecture" as a noun)
is in fact a form of systems thinking which is what distinguishes it from
design and elevates both design and construction. For instance, building sustainable enterprises and
understanding what elements in the enterprise constitute the longer-term versus
those elements that are shorter-term, can have a very powerful impact on the
way to design enterprises.
EA has conceptual (abstract,
philosophical expression), logical, and physical levels (artifacts..). EA is not just about
what artifacts are produced, it is about how they are produced. EA comprises
two inseparable parts: descriptive (nomenclatures of artifacts, relationships,
etc.) and prescriptive (rules on how to evolve this system, some kind of
philosophy). Both of them may be implicit or explicit or somewhere in between.
Both of them are used together in “what if” analysis of different
changes.
Thus, EA is abstract enough to make one contemplating the purpose of business philosophically and detailed enough upon how to achieve operational excellence with artifacts.delivery.
Thus, EA is abstract enough to make one contemplating the purpose of business philosophically and detailed enough upon how to achieve operational excellence with artifacts.delivery.
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