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November 17, 2005
Meeting with John L. King (hi to Michael D. Cohen)
I was in Michigan yesterday to meet with Dean John L. King about my new paper. It was great to meet John again, and I got to say hi to the famous Dr. Michael D. Cohen who invented the Garbage Can Model for organizational choice...
As always, John’s insightful perspectives on my academic progress was brilliant. He always brings my views to a higher level of abstraction and he is a great academic role model for me. John has published more than 150 articles and five books on the relationship between technical and social change, so his horizon is incredible. We did not talk so much about the actual article, but spend most of our time discussing the enterprise architecture concept. John is (as many academics) very critical towards new buzzwords, and we talked about the mapping of the actual words “Enterprise” and “architecture” and the use of the word in public agencies. It was an interesting discussion that really made me rethink a couple of my quick conclusions about the nature of this beast.
Maybe EA is just old wine in new bottles? I do not think so, but it is a fact that EA does nothing if we just see it as another fad in the long history of abbreviations in the IT field. Based on my findings here in the US, John suggested a good distinction between the agencies what are “Performative” and “Transformative”. OMB compliance and slideware does not do the job alone – it is about taking EA seriously and transforming the way information systems planning is conducted!
Posted by khm at 02:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 05, 2005
International Secretary of the Executive Committee of a|EA
Dr. Scott Bernard from Syracuse University has asked me to be the International Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Association of Enterprise Architects (a|EA) and I have accepted. The mission of a|EA is to provide a global forum for the advancement of the profession and practice of enterprise architecture and I am very proud to be part of the community.
a|EA also publishes the first official journal on EA – the Journal of Enterprise Architecture (j|EA). j|EA is a peer-reviewed journal and I encourage all scholars and practitioners who are interested in the EA field to subscribe to the journal. The first issue of JEA was published August this year, and issues will be delivered each quarter (in February, May, August, and November). See you all in the a|EA!
Posted by khm at 10:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 03, 2005
Hanging out with Peter De Meo
The last couple of weeks I have been hanging out with the EA-oracle Peter De Meo from IBM to see how he works with federal clients. Peter leads the US Federal Public Sector EA practice. He is currently developing the EA for the Federal Aviation Administration, a custom enterprise EA portal for the Department of Transportation, and he is providing EA subject matter expertise to various other federal clients. His focus is on how to operationalize existing EAs for managing investment portfolios and driving solution architecture requirements.
It has been interesting to participate in meetings with clients and talking to Peter about EA. Especially, it has been interesting to see how the effectiveness of EA efforts are largely dependent, not on the quality of the EA, but on the maturity of the organizations to embrace EA governance. I think that a lot of the EA efforts that we are seeing blossom in Denmark will have to go though a steep learning curve before they are successful. Public agencies must be ready to embrace the EA frameworks and associated governance requirements – it will be interesting to follow the Danish development based on my experiences here in the US.
Posted by khm at 04:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack