EA Research and Book Reports
Blog: Brian's Blog - Enterprise Strategy, Architecture and Management
Early morning jump on things only to discover I had already met requirements for the Technical RFP Response. Wow, that’s what happens when you’re really into what you’re doing. I was totally immersed into address every aspect of telling how we’d solve the problem that I had already created the timeline as part of that effort.
Well this gave me a few hours back to do some R&D. A colleague at work discussed another methodology approach PEAF, that I’ve come by in passing a while back when working on developing Microsoft’s approaches for EA practice. I figured a few weeks ago to dig deep into it, as it might provide some relevant content for my CAD for Enterprise(tm) project. Purchase three of the “booklets” — The Programmatic Family of Frameworks, An Introduction to PEAF, and Enterprise Transformation – A Pragmatic Approach Using POET .
Cruised through The Programmatic Family of Frameworks in about an hour. Listed some interesting frameworks, however, it didn’t go far enough and didn’t integrating these together. However, I guess that o.k. more justification for my book in the works “Structure in Threes” and the CAD for Enterprise(tm) project. The second book An Introduction to PEAF I’ve a similar critique. The booklet provides yet another flat model similar to TOGAF, Archimate, etc. So far all the Enterprise models and methodologies I’ve researched, and I’ve researched a lot of these, all present a flat 2D structure and hierarchy. I suppose that is 1) because of the media that the materials is presented in 2) The maturity of the field, I.T., that has claimed ownership of the topic. I’m waiting on delivery of the third: Enterprise Transformation – A Pragmatic Approach Using POET.
What I’ve seen over that several past decades of research in the field has been a lot of rephrasing, rebranding, or variations on a theme but not much advancement in thought leadership. May be this is because multidimensional thinking has not bubbled up to EA practice from neighboring Architecture, Engineering and Design Disciplines. Or may be the pragmatics of producing something “deliverable” quickly that an Executive can see pushing such ideas out of focus, or may be just specialization has created and maintains just a 2D perspective.
As far as the PEAF books I’ve read so far, imho, while on a par with other EA books and methodologies I considered them a bit overpriced for what is delivered, The springer-verlag series in this area seems just a comprehensive, with the same flaws, but cheaper and not much advanced from Spewak’s Enterprise Architecture Planning fro decades ago.
That is not to totally slam the books, for what they are; these deliver good point practices, methods, and an organizing frameworks for the perspective of EA the author has.
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