Outcomes of an Australian EA tour

Now that I’m in the wrap-up phase for my Australian EA tour, how did it go?

Pretty good, would be the short answer. A bit disappointing in certain aspects, but otherwise much what I’d hoped to see: real signs of progress on enterprise-architectures.

Part of the lead-up to the tour was a webinar for the Australian Computer Society (ACS) EA-SIG, on ‘Bridging enterprise-architecture and systems-thinking‘. The full recording is apparently up on the ACS website somewhere (though I can’t find the link, so may be members-only?), whilst the slidedeck is now up on Slideshare:

(In case you were wondering, yes, it’s an extended version of a previous slidedeck from around a year ago, ‘Bridging enterprise-architecture and systems-thinking‘ – the core concepts are much the same, but there’s quite a bit of different material to make better use of the longer timeslot.)

One key event of the tour was the Australasian Enterprise Architecture conference in Sydney. My keynote ‘The enterprise is the story‘ seems to have gone down well – rated as the presentation with the best content in the whole conference, I’m told – and that slidedeck is also now up on Slideshare:

(Those who know my work well might likewise recognise that ‘The enterprise as story‘ is a theme I’ve revisited several times over the years, first appearing at the 2012 Integrated-EA conference. As with the ACS webinar, though this one’s been edited quite a bit, to fit better with a longer timeslot.)

There were some great presentations at the conference. For me, the real highlight was Jonas Knudsen‘s work on IT and more for a huge programme of hospital-building in Denmark – an excellent example of how to do whole-of-enterprise architecture, building on concepts and techniques for ‘human centred design‘ from Ideo and others.

The nadir for me, though, would have been the presentation that, although the presenter didn’t seem to realise it, turned out to be an almost textbook example of how not to do business-architecture. I’ve no doubt at all that the presenter’s advice would be exactly what many business-folk would want to hear: but any business-architect following that model – which asserted that the only definition of ‘value’ was ‘making money for shareholders’, and explicitly excluded any functional concept of values, or values-based crosschecks – would place their clients at risk of the kind of structural failures that caused HSBC to be hit with the world’s largest ever fines, including a US$1.92bn fine for in effect setting itself up as ‘the money-launderer of choice’ for international drug-gangs. Profitable for some stakeholders in the short-term, maybe, but otherwise most definitely Not A Good Idea… Oh well.

My own workshops and masterclasses at the conference and elsewhere went well, too. The main learning from those was that I do still need more in the form of ready-made worksheets, somewhat along the lines that Jörgen Dahlberg has done so well: Watch This Space, perhaps?

The other main events were a couple of evening meetups organised by Andrew Blades of recruiter x:pand, in Melbourne and Sydney, for their x:ed professional-education series. At Andrew’s request, I did a session on recruitment for architects – ‘Attracting, retaining and getting the best from your architects‘ – for which the slidedeck is again now up on Slideshare:

It seems to have touched a useful nerve for many folks in EA and beyond: it’s had a fair few hundred hits already, in not much more than a week since I posted it up on the open Slideshare account.

Share And Enjoy, everyone? 🙂 Hope this is useful, anyway – and over to you for comment, if you wish.