Stephen Cohen's thoughts on Enterprise Architecture

Many discussions of how-to-do architecture talk about modeling the domain 'as-is' then defining the 'to-be' state. In general I agree, clearly defining the problem before identifying the solution is a risk mitigation technique. By focusing on the current...

Step with me if you will onto the slippery slope of enterprise architecture definition. I try to capture the boundaries of the enterprise in a single simple layered boxes-and-lines diagram. Relationships are conveyed through adjacency and separation helps...

The enterprise architecture team is responsible for exposing core functionality in ways that support the application teams. But how is that best done? I would like to propose a combination of 3 approaches: * Registration al la...

I spent most of yesterday going through 60+ verbose PowerPoint slides and 45 pages of detailed requirements. You see I have a customer who has run into several issues rooted in their initial design considerations. They are a CMM level 3 organization with...

How big is your enterprise? It turns out to be a very difficult question to answer. Consider this simple scenario; You have a newspaper delivery route. Your supplier pays you as a contractor. You receive the newspapers each morning from another...

Two skills have served me well while gathering information about an enterprise. First, the lessons it has been my pleasure to have learned from my customers and the many, many, bright practioners I have been lucky enough to work with. Second, the ability...

I spent the last week working on a proof of concept for a very large customer. They wanted to build a service oriented software infrastructure to be used across many well known, and all possible future, applications. The principle goal is to provide safety...

Enterprise Architects face many directions at once and the deliverables are intended to help with the various lines of communication. * The models help aid the validation and discovery phase with the stakeholders and later provide a well known visualization...

Enterprise architecture products are decomposed into two primary categories; Inward facing products guiding or documenting the activities of the enterprise architecture program, or Outward facing products used to facilitate discovery and communicate...

Generally the success of an individual project has been determined by how well its requirements were met. However the larger enterprise is better served if great care was taken to determine what will be "best" for the enterprise and how the individual...

I believe that enterprise architecture more closely resembles social structures than physical structures and enterprise architects are more closely related to the authors of the declaration of independence than structural engineers. This is a key differentiator...

When you speak to a traditional architect you are likely to hear about defining a space optimized by the structure for an intended use. Oddly, we in the software architecture world rarely discuss the space. Instead we focus on the activities of the product...

In an enterprise where architecture defines more than standards but creates governance so that many projects work together over time, cross project integration is much more a mandate than a target of opportunity. Consider the need for a cohesive identity...