Enterprise Architecture: Vision & Reality

This week’s Cyb3rSyn Newsletter is a special mid-week edition summarizing the key highlights of the second Cyb3rSyn Labs Podcast episode - my conversation with Graham Berrisford, who is the author of the book, “A Systems Thinker’s View of Enterprise Architecture”. The book is exclusive and free to download for all the members of the Cyb3rSyn Community.

The podcast is a good introduction to the book in which Graham explains where Enterprise Architecture (EA) came from, what it is and is not, the role it plays in an organization today, and how it relates to systems thinking.

Graham initially studied psychology and encountered systems concepts through the Open University on BBC in the 1970s. These early systems were physical, such as shipyards or farms, with physical boundaries. He later taught structured systems analysis and design, which he notes wasn't social system thinking. In 2011, he attended a meeting on systems thinking and discovered a different approach, creating tension between engineers and those interested in people.

Graham is primarily concerned with rule-bound, regular, engineered systems, but acknowledges their intersection with people in organizations.

Here are key highlights of the presentation from Graham and my conversation with him…

From Clay Tablets to Digitization: The conversation begins by positioning enterprise architecture within a historical context, starting from the earliest forms of record-keeping on clay tablets. This historical perspective emphasizes how the need to manage and organize information has been a long-standing challenge for humans. The real push for EA came with the Information Age as businesses began digitizing the information they collected. This digitization, while revolutionary, led to a "mess" of uncoordinated databases and redundant data.

Reaction to Information Overload: Enterprise architecture emerged as a direct response to the challenges posed by this information overload. It was conceived as a way to gain oversight of the sprawling data landscape, to standardize and integrate systems, and ultimately to create a coherent business system. The goal was to bring order to the chaos and leverage information more effectively.

TOGAF's Perspective: The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), a widely used EA framework, considers the enterprise as a system. It defines architecture as the fundamental concepts or properties of a system. However, the conversation points out that TOGAF does not offer an explicit definition of what constitutes a system.

Event-Driven Activity Systems: Graham's presentation builds on the idea of the enterprise as a system by elaborating on it as an event-driven activity system. This perspective highlights the dynamic nature of the enterprise, where activities are triggered by events and result in changes to the system's state.

Inputs, Outputs, and Actors: In this view, a system transforms inputs into outputs. Inputs are information or material products consumed by the system, while outputs are the information or material products provided by the system. Actors, both internal and external, play roles in the system. Internal actors perform roles within the system's processes, while external actors provide inputs or consume outputs.

Activities and Resources: Inside the system, actors interact in regular activities, using resources to meet aims. Activities are behaviors, while resources are the assets used in those activities. Information is identified as the principal resource in enterprise architecture.

The Importance of Aims Alignment: The abstracted system itself can be viewed as having aims, as do its customers and the purposeful actors within the system. Graham calls out that achieving alignment among these different sets of aims is crucial for the overall effectiveness of the enterprise.

Levels of Granularity: The presentation identifies different levels of architecture, including enterprise, segment, solution, and software. Each level represents a different level of granularity, with enterprise architecture taking a portfolio-level view and software architecture detailing the internal structure of an application.

Security as a Cross-Cutting Concern: Security is highlighted as a cross-cutting concern that spans every domain and level of architecture.

Domains of Architecture: Enterprise architecture is typically divided into domains such as business, data, applications, and technology. Different perspectives, such as IT architecture or information systems architecture, may focus on specific combinations of these domains.