Unicom EA Forum March 2013 Chairman's Keynote Slides

1. RICHARD VERYARD
Unicom EA Forum March 2013
Enterprise
Architecture
on Trial

2. Explaining and Judging Practice
What is a Practice?
Four Causes
 (Aristotle)
Three Prong Method
 (MoZi)
Four Prong Method
 (Veryard)
Explaining Judging

3. What is a Practice?
Community
 There are individuals and organizations
who are associated with the practice.
 (Medicine is associated with doctors and
clinics.)
Instrumental (Functional)
 It should perform some function.
 (Medicine is associated with keeping
people healthy and fighting disease.)
Conceptual (Discursive)
 It should offer a language for reasoning
and talking about things.
 (Doctors can communicate with one
another, and with other practitioners such
as pharmacists.)
Knowledge-based
 There is some body of knowledge that is
available to practitioners.
 (In the case of medicine, this includes
anatomy, physiology and biochemistry.)
Service
 There is a way in which practitioners
engage with the subject.
 (There are established ways for patients
to visit doctors, and for doctors to be
paid.)
What is EA?
 When people talk about Enterprise
Architecture, they may mean any or all of
the above.

4. Which Practice?
 An individual or team customizes a
framework for a specific project or
organization.
 The project or organization deviates from
the official framework in various ways.
 Adding and subtracting activities
 Simpler or more complicated pathways
 Links to other frameworks
 Use of available tools
 A project may be retrospectively massaged
to comply with an official framework.
 The participants may be more or less
aware of any deviations and their
consequences.
Official
• What the
book says
Emergent
• What the
community
does
Espoused
• What the
team thinks
it is doing
In-Use
• What the
team
actually
does

5. Four Causes (Aristotle)
Final Cause
 What's the purpose, for
whom? Outcomes.
Material Cause
 What is the stuff that is
being worked on?
 What things are being
attended to?
Efficient Cause
 Who does it, and how?
Process.
Formal Cause
 What's the conceptual
framework?
Methodological Emphasis?
 Over-emphasis on the Formal Cause in
books and training materials?

6. Three Prong Method (MoZi)
Origin
 “the sage kings of antiquity”
Validity
 reference to the evidence
 "the eyes and ears of the
people”
Applicability
 whether it brings benefit to
the enterprise and the people

7. Who are the sage kings?
(How many can you recognize?)

8. Four Prong Method (Veryard)
Effective
 There is some evidence that it works
and delivers value.
Grounded
 There is some explanation why it
works. The explanation is often
expressed as some form of theory.
Coherent
 Not just random collections of ideas
and tools, but having a meaningful
identity
Progressive
 Capable of learning systematically
from experience, and adapting itself
to new situations.
 Don’t take results at face value
 Don’t take participants’
theories at face value
2x Caution

9. Avoid Magical Thinking
 Birds have feathers. Birds fly
 We want arrow to fly. Arrow
must have feathers to be like
bird.
 Ironically, putting feathers
on arrows actually works,
but not for the reason that
our ancestors thought.

10. More …
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http://leanpub.com/u/richardveryard
Events from Unicom
http://richardveryard.eventbrite.co.uk/
Blog
http://rvsoapbox.blogspot.co.uk/
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