Enterprise-architecture for a real-time world
What exactly do we do every day in enterprise-architecture? What value does it deliver to
the business? How do we develop our skills and experience, our judgement and awareness,
so as to keep on enhancing the value that we deliver? And how do we do it fast, to respond
to the real-time pressures of an always-on business world?
Many books on enterprise-architecture place an emphasis on frameworks, models or
methods – their overall theory of architecture, without much description of what actually
happens in day-to-day practice. The reason for that gap is simple: if we start from theory,
it’s hard to show much more than guidelines and principles without getting lost in
irrelevant detail, because every architecture context is different.
So this book takes almost the opposite approach. We concentrate on the everyday activities
that underpin each of the architecture disciplines – particularly the core processes such as
sensemaking and design-thinking.
We explore how and why and when the various items of ‘theory-stuff’ come into the picture
– all those methods, frameworks, models, metamodels and other information-sources.
And we show how to do all of that in a real architecture-project that must deliver real
business-value in just two working weeks – not the two years or more required by some
other approaches to enterprise-architecture. So yes, real enterprise-architecture, in real-time,
that really does make business sense.
Use the architecture itself to explain how to do enterprise architecture.