Apr 25, 2021
EA by its assets from Svyatoslav Kotusev
It was a long time since an enterprise architecture book really attract my attention and makes me come back to it often when doing my architect job.
I take advantage of the released of the 2nd edition of “The Practice of Enterprise Architecture: A Modern Approach to Business and IT Alignment”, by Svyatoslav Kotusev, to write this short post.
Kotusev is looking at enterprise architecture (EA) with a researcher view and provides an interesting outside-in vision of our current practices. Its core message is that in order to be able to describe the EA, you should think artifacts.
Enterprise architecture (EA) is a description of an enterprise from an integrated business and IT perspective consisting of multiple diverse documents, or artifacts.
EA artefacts can be classified based on the objects of their description, from more generic ones to more specific ones, into:
- Rules describe broad global rules defining the organization or its divisions;
- Structures describe high-level structures of the organization or its parts,
- Changes describe specific proposed changes to the organization.
EA artefacts can be classified based on the terminology of their description into:
- Business-focused EA artefacts are typically technology-neutral and use business language (money, customers, capabilities, business goals, competitive advantages, etc.)
- IT-focused EA artefacts are usually purely technical and use IT-specific language (systems, applications, databases, platforms, networks, etc.).
The results is an evidence-based model of an EA on a single page.
Provides a one-page aggregated view of popular EA artifacts used in organizations with their most essential properties, including their informational content, representation format, high-level structure, overall meaning, typical usage, temporal lifecycle, general role, key purpose and associated benefits
Since It not easily visible on Medium, find below a summary:
The value is then for each assets are summarized below
Kotusev also proposed the Enterprise Architecture Practice on a Page:
Proposed a one-page aggregated view of the core processes constituting an EA practice with their interrelationships and most essential properties, including their main goals and motives, necessary participants, underlying EA artifacts and documents, key activities and associated techniques, temporal nature and general meaning.
To discover its vision of EA practice, the book is the best way to get all information in one place. I also highly recommends to have a look on its long list of published articles freely available. The ones around TOGAF worth the read!
PS: I also want to mention than a basic teaching pack intended for universities based on the book.
