Tuesday, July 01, 2008

 

Enterprise Architecture and Perception of the Masses

One thousand lemmings can't be wrong...



Rewind back several centuries where the masses in Europe thought the world was flat and imagine the burden of convincing the masses who held their own perceptions of reality that there was another truth. Nowadays, the discussion shifts towards topics such as Green IT, the popularity of Gartner, outsourcing to India and so on. It is a lost art to analyze based on merit and instead it is better to rely on popularity.

Another trend in large enterprises is the notion of assembling standards committees (bodies) where the goal is to represent the discipline as a whole. This practice mirrors many of the standards committees outside the enterprise such as the IEEE, ACM, OMG, SOA Consortium or others and are constructed and sold based on their supposed influence. Many of these committees command respect amongst practitioners but otherwise have no weight.

How come most committees don't simply say they exist to bring about consistency. FASB exists so that annual reports can be compared in an apple-to-apples way. Likewise, it is a fallacy that real engineering occurs in committees when reality says that the reason for existence is more social than scientific.

Committees who embrace the buzzwords of best practices tend to do so without proving it the best. Best practices are social constructs and not technical...






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