Out in the back-room
Apologies for being a bit quiet lately: I’m working flat-out on a mini-book on enterprise-architecture, with the aim of having it ready, preferably in printed form, in time for the next TOGAF conference, in Paris, in late April 2007 (23-25, to be precise).
If I can keep up the current pace, I should have a first draft for review up on the Tetradian site by mid-March. I’ll keep you posted, anyway.
I’m looking forward to seeing your booklet Tom. Can you give us a preview of the topics you will be covering?
Hopefully your book will go beyond TOGAF as this topic has been covered to death…
Hi Shawn, James – hope the next topic (already posted) gives you some answers on that.
Yeah, James, I too have serious reservations about TOGAF – they’re doing useful work in the IT-space, but not really much beyond that, even though at every conference people plead with them to address the framework’s huge limitations, especially in the business-architecture area.
What I’ve been trying to do with the book – and for a fair few years now, in any case – is to stop thinking of IT as a special case (which it isn’t, exactly as you say in your own blog) and instead rethink enterprise-architecture from the ground up. What _is_ the enterprise? What is its purpose? Its people? Its knowledge? Its processes, activities, assets in the broadest sense?
To my mind, there’s little or no real point in diving down into TOGAF-like detail until we _have_ sorted things out right up at that topmost level – or at least gotten some kind of reasonable handle on it.
Opinions, p’raps?