What is the most valuable asset in an Enterprise Architect’s toolkit?
Its super simple...
It is information — not just any information, but structured information. The right kind of information, available when you need it and how you need it, so you can make informed decisions.
In my day-to-day work, half my time is spent understanding the enterprise in all its guts and glory. You could spend 20+ years in a company and still have loads to learn about how everything operates. I once knew an EA who had been with a company that long — they could instantly tell you the unwritten reasons why certain projects were executed! That person still had to ping people to understand how stuffs worked all the time!
So how do we, as flawed humans with limited memory, working in our roles for a limited period of time, become most effective as Enterprise Architects?
Well-documented information.
I can already hear you saying, “Great, Viswa, your solution is to document stuff? Really?”
As engineers, we all know nobody writes perfect code comments — and even if we do, nobody reads them. And even if someone reads them, they’re outdated by the time the code hits production. Let’s be honest, nobody is THAT good. But you do know that by reading or executing the code, you can still understand it to a large extent.
So, what is the architecture equivalent of code?
The Meta Model.
I’ll confess, I’m most familiar with the LeanIX Meta Model because that’s what I use at work, but honestly, any meta model should work.
“What about other meta models?” you ask.
I have no idea — that’s homework for later. 😄
You’ve probably already worked with pieces of a meta model without realizing it:
CMDBs for application information
Excel spreadsheets documenting business processes
PowerPoints showing business capability maps
If you don’t have a centralized meta model that links all this information together like Wikipedia (I love wikipedia), then you’ve probably been playing detective.
For example, if you want to know how payment processing works in your company, you’d probably:
Ping a couple of engineers for a walkthrough
Draw up a flowchart
Talk to product and business folks to understand the customer journey
Finally, stitch everything together to design a future-state solution from the current state
With the LeanIX Meta Model, all of the above is stored in an application (yes, very Inception-like) within a standardized template. Check out the LeanIX website if you want to dig deeper.
This essentially gives us a way to “write code” in the EA space. And just like code, maintaining it is a communal effort across the organization. LeanIX even applies a quality seal to ensure the validity of stored data.
With this structured information, you have an EA-level view of the enterprise at your fingertips — cutting down on your detective work dramatically.
Is it perfect? Aw, hell naw!
But it’s a great first step toward providing structured insights into Enterprise Architecture.
What kind of structured information is available at your company? How easy or hard is it to write, maintain and read it?