EA - Enterprise Architecture or Extreme Aggravation

- Mohan Babu K

In my previous EA blog entry, I had written about contextualizing Infosys’ Enterprise Architecture survey findings. Since then I had an opportunity to observe and reflect on an aspect of the survey: adoption – and challenges - of Enterprise Architecture Tool at a Global 500 enterprise. To set the context for the discussion, a brief extract from the survey report as it pertains to adoption of EA tools:

• There is an increased adoption of EA tools, but there is no product which has managed to dominate the market
• The EA tools market is fragmented with the vast majority of respondents claiming to use general office and collaboration tools and drawing tools (e.g. Microsoft Visio) for Enterprise Architecture Modeling

This should not surprise many of us in the industry!

Continue reading "Observations and musings on Enterprise Architecture Tools" »

Posted by Guest Author at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Current issue of the New Scientist magazine has a very interesting cover story on “Seven reasons why people hate reason”.  Now, that is a guide I would have loved to have alongside during some rather difficult stakeholder engagements, when I couldn’t stop thinking “If only they could be reasonable…”.

Continue reading "Reason, Stakeholder Engagement / Management and EA" »

Posted by Rajeev Arora at 07:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As I sit down to blog for the first time on the Enterprise Architecture blogs, a very fundamental question crosses my mind.  That is how do architects speak, or communicate in general.

 A very common occurance is to use a lot of buzzwords.  I once encountered an architect who said "issue A and issue B are orthagonal".  He meant A and B are independent of each other.  Architecture patterns too - be they singletons or facades - can be confusing explanations to IT management and customers.

Continue reading "Architecture Speak" »

Posted by Rajeev Arora at 03:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Gartner recently published their June 2008 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture (EA) tools. (See http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=697707&ref=g_sitelink (registration required); or a free version at http://www.troux.com/company/news/pressrelease.asp?pr=080618_gartnermq_pr.xml).

A couple of things sprang to mind as I skimmed through the report:

Tools are rarely the main reason for unsuccessful EA activities. There's the commonly quoted phrase "a fool with a tool is still a fool" (and can add "a fool with a tool can do more damage more quickly").

Continue reading "Enterprise Architecture Tools & the Gartner Magic Quadrant" »

Posted by Andrew Manning at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)