Who stole Enterprise Architecture?

Dear friends,

The term Enterprise Architecture (EA) appeared in the literature for the first time some 25 years ago. Enterprise architecture pioneers like John Zachman and Stephen Spewak linked the concept with a multidimensional and layered structuring of an enterprise, intended to satisfy the needs of the business. Since then, various frameworks have been introduced by different individuals and organizations, ranging from military and government to private sector. Practically all of them contain the basic elements in some shape or form: business drivers and requirements, information architecture, process architecture, application architecture, and technical architecture. The practitioners and standardization bodies are in violent agreement that these are all in the heart of enterprise architecture.

Given the above, one would assume that the concept and the term Enterprise Architecture would  be a stable part of common knowledge. I wish this was true, but the EA culture is suffering from unnecessary turbulence. There are individuals and organizations, acting out of ignorance or commercial interest, trying to introduce definitions and interpetations that are not adding value but rather distorting the picture and confusing those that are new to the topic. For example, some companies having a significant interest in the technology side of IT have advertised enterprise architecture as a big IT architecture. Having strong marketing muscles and excellent access to enterprises through their IT departments, they have created the confusion among their customers that EA is about IT only. If this is the first message that the CEO hears from the CIO about EA, the damage has been done and is difficult to repair.

The above is an example of twisting the meaning of an existing term. Another type of confusion arises from inventing completely new terms. This has been the core competence of marketing departments throughout the history. Marketing is seeking novelty, defining niches which then can be occupied, claiming to be the first or biggest in the recently invented niche. You can always define your own terms and concepts, and distract your customers from the competition. There is no need to have true novelty in your products or services, playing with words is enough. This is an old strategy: if you can't win on a level playground, try tilting the playground. Who cares if you do damage to your customers and to the enterprise architecture community.

Education, science, and language are part of our culture. As such, they are subject to the natural laws governing the eternal evolution of culture. Despite of this unavoidable evolution, we need to keep in mind that it is not random but is influenced by people. It does matter, where the evolution takes us and that we do influence it, when it matters. Concepts like business capability and enterprise architecture are purely abstract and artifical, but they are serving an important purpose for the enterprise management and should be engineered to serve that purpose effectively. Whether we can or cannot, is determined by the strength of the global community of scientists and practitioners driving the ontological process for enterprise architecture. New terms and concepts should be introduced cautiously, weighing their value and linkage to existing ones. New knowledge has value only if it can be put in the context of some existing knowledge. This way we can make sure that climbing the stairs of knowledge is not followed by falling down on our noses.

Enterprise architecture is not something completely new and isolated from other parts of management science. It derives from systems thinking for its philosophical part, and from systems engineering and economics for the methodological part. We need to protect it as the broad conceptual framework and foundation for defining, scoping, and positioning other disciplines like Business Modeling (BM), Operational Development (OD), Business Process Analysis (BPA), Business Process Management (BPM), Enterprise Business Process Management (EBPM), Capability Maturity Model (CMM), Six Sigma, Business Intelligence (BI), and Corporate Performance Management (CPM). None of these disciplines has the richness of semantics and structure to be used as a reference framework for the others. Enterprise architecture as a concept and discipline has these properties for the most part, and as for the remaining properties, let's make sure EA evolves to cover them as well. Starting from the scratch, with a completely new term and concept, is not feasible nor necessary.

Together we can catch and stop the term thieves!

Jaakko Riihinen
Senior Vice President
Products and Technology
QPR Software Plc

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