lustratus LiteBytes

Yesterday I was presenting at the…

…Architecting the Enterprise show in London, organised in conjunction with the Open Group. I understand this was the tenth year of the show. SOA featured a lot, but I confess that I found myself slipping between dreams and reality. I had a horrible suspicion that a lot of what was being talked about was the same ten years ago, and will be the same in another ten. Sure, there were new words like SOA being spread around. But I found that the general flavour remained one of the amazing power and benefit of implementing a corporate-wide enterprise architecture, spanning operational business models and IT infrastructures…but a bit light on how this is actually achieved in real life.

I would have liked to see more on such questions as how to deal with organizational issues, how to build the business case for the first and subsequent steps of investment, how to resolve conflicts, how to prioritize, whether there is an incremental path that makes sense, etc..

But there was one excellent pitch from Professor David Robertson of IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland. He had a really nice pasta-based analogy as companies move through the stages of implementing an Enterprise Architecture, progressing from a huge pile of spaghetti to bowls of spaghetti, then lasagne and finally ravioli. Use your imagination!

Steve