On enterprise and SW architecture
In his book Chess and the art of enterprise architecture Gerben Wierda laments how enterprise architecture (EA) has failed. According to Wierda, the purpose of EA has been, since the term was coined back in 1980s, to make sure that large projects succeed and that there will be not be chaos, and that the cooperation among business and their IT departments works well. This has not happened despite large resources allocated to EA. Many EA functions have spent way too much time on reference architecture, or have become decision approval institutions, and as such bottlenecks. As the important architecture decision usually happen in projects, of which the EA personnel is not well aware, EA cannot but accept what has happened. After reading Wierda’s book (which by the way is available in the Kamppi office library), I came to think whether one explanation for the apparent failure of EA has been wrong focus. What if the real, sensible purpose of EA is to make sure that the over...