Signs of movement at the EA Corral

At last, a vendor model of enterprise-architecture that doesn’t assume that the enterprise-architecture world begins and ends with IT. This is from Metastorm, who now own the ProVision EA toolset.

The main product page shows the usual oh-yawn ‘business architecture is really part of IT’ hierarchy. By contrast, the image above is from their ‘Snapshot on Business Architecture‘ white-paper, which shows they’ve at last realised that ‘business engineering’ (for which read ‘human-based processes’) need to be addressed separately yet in parallel with the IT-based processes. From my view, this is still a long way from complete – it needs the machine-based dimension as well, and a lot more clarity than just dumping everything below architecture into ‘Physical World’. But the fact that this does cover a broader scope than just IT is an important step.

Presumably this shows where their thinking is going rather than what they’re actually doing as yet, because last time I saw ProVision (a few months back) the toolset didn’t support anything like this. And unfortunately ProVision is the only serious EA toolset I know that has no scripting language, which means there’s no way to do workarounds for the product’s inevitable limitations. But at least it’s a start: signs of movement at last.

(Many thanks to Peter Tseglakof at Australia Post for the link.)