Stephen Cohen's thoughts on Enterprise Architecture

It is the use of a product, not the content, which drives the selection of a specific model or artifact.

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 the interim findings of the EA team.

For example;

 

It is likely that inwardly facing Use Case models would be built for the Enterprise Architecture team to identify major business activities and the entities interacting with each major process and a similar set of SIPOC (Supplier-Input-Process-Output-Consumer) models intended to validate the Use Cases and further detail areas that may have been be lacking.  Later, the Use Cases may be filtered to an essential few, additional detail added, and the used again as a set of outward facing models to aid in achieving consensus within the organization or validating with the responsible business unit involved with the represented activity.

 

This is not to say that a specific product is destined for exclusive inward or outward use. Instead I am proposing that it is the use of a product, not the content, which drives the selection of a specific model or artifact.   

Published Tuesday, February 17, 2004 8:15 PM by Stcohen
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