- Introducing Smart Ecosystem Architecture (SEA)
In recent months there has been considerable debate about Enterprise Architecture or EA. Practitioners who have embraced EA are now hotly discussing whether EA is a business or IT architecture and the balance between the two domains. Without any doubt most EA today is IT focused even though practitioners know it shouldn't be. And the new EA standard TOGAF 9 merely reinforces this. Although there is a vocal lobby who would like to gain more power and influence in the enterprise by taking the lead in business architecture and design, typically they are unable to achieve this because they can't articulate or demonstrate why the business should let them.
Many years ago when we published the first CBDI Maturity Model we recognized that SOA maturity would be defined by the ecosystem. This maturity stage followed the enterprise stage. I will readily admit that in the early days the ecosystem stage was ill defined; in fact no one was interested. Apart from a small minority of enterprises that have always operated an ecosystem business model, the focus of attention was always heavily on the enterprise. Today we can see things have moved on apace. Various influences particularly Complex Event Driven Architecture and Smart Business and IT are strongly predicated on optimizing business design and processes involving all the ecosystem stakeholders. Examples:
- Airlines, airports, airport concessions, airport services, hotels and rental car companies form an ecosystem that optimize their resources and prices on a dynamic basis dependent upon external events, raw demand and actual traffic. Actually we wrote a research report around this model years ago – see reference.
- Smart power grids with tighter linkage between customers, suppliers, generators, assets and operations manage power supply to optimize use of green energy, price to consumers and profitability.
The emphasis on business optimization is very interesting. This means that conventional architecture domains of operational systems, business intelligence (BI) and management information (MI) become much more inter dependent and dynamic. New types of information, perhaps conventionally classed as operational, now become critical MI. Real time feedback loops require derived information to be available in the operational timeframe. Conventional (sic) SOA layered architecture policy requires extension to manage new patterns.
In these examples of the new enterprise each participant collaborates to optimize the overall ecosystem and in the process optimize their own position vs their collaborators. In this world the architecture is absolutely not enterprise wide. It is goal driven, focusing on a scope that is business results driven.
Does this mean that EA is dead? As discussed, in its current form EA has actually been less than successful. The current level of debate is merely confirmation of the patently obvious. Personally I recommend a more practical approach to architecture that is more grounded with stronger relationships and shorter feedback loops to business value and delivery projects. Given the current issues with EA it would be expedient to have unambiguous naming without the baggage of EA. I am temped to say that Business Architecture works because most grownups understand that Business and IT are indistinguishable at this stage of the game. But I see a lot of immature debate from EAs that want to elevate EA away from IT, which is plainly wrong. Also I don’t have a strong opinion on the "role" of EA. Rather I worry about the nature of the architecture. I want to get everyone thinking about a new perspective and scope.
On balance therefore I prefer a naming that emphasizes the architecture scope and deliverables, the differences from what we have been doing and the need for change. I suggest Smart Ecosystem Architecture (SEA).
References:
CBDI Report: Modeling for SOA - Worked Example - The passenger departure process - from arrival at the airport to boarding the plane.
CBDI Report: A Web Services Maturity Model
Posts
3 comments:
Well written David. At IASA we strive to make the common name IT Architecture as IT is indistinguishable from business at all levels in the same way that Finance, Sales, Manufacturing are all quote, the business. We believe that architecture brings a maturity to the value chain from technology to the executive committee and shareholders. To be sure the EA and BA are not related to IT crowd is very noisy but they are a tremendously small percentage.
Paul
There are many things today that refer to themselves as EA but they clearly are not. However, we are turning a corner, and there is a general wakening to true EA and the true value of EA. Now IMO is not the time to change the name. By doing so, we simply have a new title for those who practice bad EA to hang their hats on and corrupt.
However, in principle, I agree with the sentiment that what some call EA clearly is not. They are the problem, not EA itself.
Regards
The Enterprising Architect
Hi David,
You mentioned above that the ecosystem stage of CBDI Maturity Model in the early days was ill defined. I wonder if that has changed today with more industry recognition that SOA is really about an ecosystem or space in which people, machines and services inhabit and interact as autonomous participants for the exchange of value. In fact, this is the premise from which OASIS develops its Reference Architecture for SOA. Also, recently Gartner has proposed a new approach to enterprise architecture, calling it Emergent Architecture - http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1124112.
Not sure about the right name, but I am certainly expecting SOA at my workplace to emerge under the conditions of proliferation of decentralised solutions, scarce resources, rapidly-changing business processes to meet ever-changing market conditions, autonomous stakeholders, the relentless march of open source technologies, social computing, mashups into the enterprise solution space.
~YeUWeN
Post a Comment