Comments on: Enterprise architects are town planners not architects

By: Innovation Labs in search of creativity « Derivadow.com

Innovation Labs in search of creativity « Derivadow.com — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:12:28 +0000

[...] constraints, objectives and tangible deliverables. Spending too long conceptualising your idea can leave you short of Oxygen, you need to get down from the abstract and deal with the actual. Doing so helps your idea to grow [...]

By: Tom Scott

Tom Scott — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 23:41:07 +0000

Ingine,

I’m not suggesting that Adobe contributes very much to any enterprises bottom line – rather that Adobe is a very successful company in its own right because, according to Christopher Baus, they focusing on doing not talking.

Nor am I suggesting that there should be no coordination. In the same way I don’t think towns should grow without coordination. But what I am suggesting is that this coordination role should be limited to those issues that concern interoperability this, I think, is analogous to the role of a town planner. When ‘Enterprise Architects’ stray outside this role and start dictating implementation issues we get in trouble – in the same way that we would be in trouble if a central planner tried to plan out how every building would be built, what materials it would use, what the design should be.

One of the reasons we get in trouble is because to deal with a problem that large (architecting an entire town) requires such massive level of abstraction that they run out of oxygen. Let Town Planners and ‘Enterprise Architects’ (if you must call them that) worry about the central issue of interoperability and; Architects and System Architects + Software Engineers etc. worry about how to build a solution to someone’s problem.

By: ingine

ingine — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 15:49:52 +0000

This is a good read to know the angst of a thinker from the bottom-up level. Dear Sir! What will you do when the OZONE layer depletes. Who is thinking about it. Yes, those who don’t have much oxygen to live on. But these guys do for they have genuine concern. This is tip of the ice berg. It is nice to learn how one has contributed to Adobe’s growth. But is Adobe alone good enough for an enterprise. In fact in terms of ROI, how much percentage does ‘Adobe’ alone contribute to a large enterprise. What fraction? Barely enough. And, ‘Adobe’ alone within a larger enterprise context will be dysfunctional in lack of a bigger picture that helps in achieving a co-ordinated functionality achieved from a matrix of application software portfolio/s.

About the ‘talkers’ and ‘doers’. IBM took the ‘talker’ Rational and has got much better as a ‘doer’ – walking the talk I guess.

Thanks
srinidhi

By: Michal Migurski

Michal Migurski — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 21:03:44 +0000

Sadly, if you read some of the new architecture bloggers out there like Geoff Manaugh, it seems that architects themselves fancy themselves town planners.