We spent last week out in Munich at the last of this year’s Open Group Enterprise Architecture conferences. The main theme of the conference for this quarter was Secure Architectures, although we were there to present our ‘State of The Nation’ views on our existing EA project, funded by JISC. To that end, a rather hurried setup of a day-long track was put together by Open Group and JISC which was attended by both UK and Dutch Higher Ed institutions, backed by JISC and SURF respectively.
Turnout was probably lower than we expected on the day, but that was perhaps due to the late setup of the meeting and seemingly the general lack of interest in the UK for all things EA. We know that there are a few other institutions in the UK who ‘do’ EA in some shape or form, but they tend to be entirely inward focussed on their own business rather than publically-active in promoting the discipline.
Details of the sessions will be available via the Open Group’s website at http://www.opengroup.org/conference-live/ (as are all the presentations from the other sessions and previous conferences). Of course, if you find ours, then I must warn you that it will make not one jot of sense to you unless you were actually there. You really do need to watc it presented with audio – so perhaps I should pull my finger out an put a voiceover together for it.
It was interesting to see just how embeded EA thinking is in Dutch institutions – particularly the couling between the TOGAF ADM as an architectural development methodology, and Archimate as a Framework and modelling language to put your modelled artifacts in. I guess this isn’t so surprising on the Archimate front, given that the Archimate Foundation was originally formed out of Dutch technical institutions. I’m definitely warming to the pan-domain use of Archimate over UML for use in cases where application development isn’t all that strong (as it isn’t with us).
If you have a lot of business users you need to talk with, and they’re used to simple diagrams, then Archimate may well be worth looking at. I think it’s now reached the heady heights of being v1.0, as I believe it was an approved standard at this conference. Archimate, for the uninitiated, was taken under The Open Group wing earlier in the year as a forum in its own right.
In other news, there were a number of sessions where much was made about what EA is, and whether it actually exists at all. Essentially, (and apologies for this ahead of time), the conversations went something like this:
Enterprise Architecture has—or rather had—a problem, which was this: most of the people in it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches and TOGAF Certification.
Many of the architects were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
So you see, EA is a fluid and fun community after all. I think the debate was pretty healthy to be fair – there are a lot of adopters who are now mature enough to realise that they need to do ‘something else’ other than follow a prescriptive approach to their strategic architectural development.
More anon.
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Paul lives, rides and works in Cardiff, South Wales. His work seems to largely entail fixing things and keeping wheels on. Officially, he is actively engaged and interested in Enterprise Architecture these days, but has a secret past that involved standing around on glaciers collecting meltwater samples, and walking through endless fields of wheat taking radiance measurements. 