Enterprise architecture stuff

I’ve been doing a bit of back-and-forth with editor Annelies vdV for the very final page-proof tweaks to my article (among 32 others) in the upcoming itSMF / Van Haren IT Service Management Global Best Practices Part 1 (2008) . Their website says it will be available from 11 April, though the formal schedule says it doesn’t have its official launch till somewhere around 19-22 April.

The article is titled “The Viable Services Model: service quality, service interdependence and service completeness”, and is about using a variant of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model to model cross-dependencies throughout an enterprise. It’s more business-architecture than IT-architecture, but I doubt the IT service-management folks would mind. 🙂 Won’t be able to put it up on the main Tetradian website, unfortunately, for copyright reasons, so ya’ll just have to buy a copy when it comes out, won’t you? 🙂

And just had confirmation that I’ll be presenting at the TOGAF Glasgow enterprise-architecture conference, on 21-23 April. Working title for the presentation is “Enterprise Architecture and the Service-Oriented Enterprise”; it’ll be partly based on the itSMF article and partly on the restructure of Zachman and TOGAF that I’ve been using in my own EA work, to help break the EA field out of its current sadly-misplaced obsession with IT alone, and instead actually be enterprise-architecture.

Some hope that I’ll have physical copies there of the new mini-book (or not-so-mini-book – it’s getting big!) on ‘Bridging the Silos: enterprise-architecture for IT-architects‘. (At the least, I’ll have electronic copies there.) And a fairly good chance that I’ll also have available there a proper published version of the previous mini-book in that series, ‘Real Enterprise-Architecture‘ – if I can get sense in time out of the ISBN agency and my prospective print-on-demand providers… More on that saga in another post, probably.

Also on the book-production stack is an earlier mini-book on business-architecture, ‘Power and Responsibility: the human side of systems‘. This dates back some years, to when I was doing a lot of research on power-dynamics in organisations, and was the base for much of the later work on the SEMPER whole-of-organisation effectiveness-diagnostic. The book does need a sizeable rewrite in places to get it up to date with my current thinking, but if the print-on-demand process works as well as I hope, I should be able to get it out in book form by somewhen in June or July.

Watch This Space, as usual, really.