Book Image

recrEAtion: Realizing the Extraordinary Contribution of Your Enterprise Architects

By : Chris Potts
Book Image

recrEAtion: Realizing the Extraordinary Contribution of Your Enterprise Architects

By: Chris Potts

Overview of this book

Enterprise architecture is an organization’s ultimate backbone that applies calculated planning methodologies to design, analyze, plan, and implement business strategies. recrEAtion offers instructions through the vehicle of a business novel wherein our protagonist, Simon, joins an organization in New York as their first-ever Vice President of Enterprise Architecture. He meets the CTO and CEO of the company on his very first day, and their conversation takes a very unexpected turn. What follows is Simon’s journey across the globe where he deciphers the true meaning of EA. As you go through the chapters, you will learn the two key goals of EA—improving business performance and establishing a flexible mechanism—reinforced through various observations during Simon’s journeys. You will derive conclusions through analysis to facilitate the efficiency of industrial operations and see that enterprise architecture needs to be more about the business, and less about sophisticated IT diagrams and 5-year plans. By the end of this book, you will understand the challenges that EA’s face and have the skills to deal with them in a constrained time frame.
Table of Contents (29 chapters)
Preface
Free Chapter
1
ONE
ONE
2
New York City, USA
3
TWO
TWO
4
Toronto, Canada
5
THREE
6
New York City, USA
7
FOUR
8
Travelling to Tokyo
9
FIVE
10
Tokyo, Japan
11
SIX
SIX
12
Thin Air
13
SEVEN
14
Back in New York City, USA
15
EIGHT
16
Sydney, Australia
17
NINE
18
Hong Kong, China
19
TEN
TEN
20
Paris, France
21
ELEVEN
22
Abu Dhabi, UAE
23
TWELVE
24
Toronto, Canada
25
THIRTEEN
26
New York City, USA
27
FOURTEEN
28
Home…..?

Sydney, Australia

In Sydney, I learned the first of two apparently paradoxical lessons about architecture. If you get too close to the details, or the technologies, it’s impossible to see the architecture at all. But the apparent paradox - which I will come back to later - is that successful architecture is very much about the details.

As this was the first stop on my journey to create a repeatable process for EA as a strategic capability, I wasn’t sure whether to start at the end (“Apply”) and work backwards, or the beginning (“Establish”) and work forwards. How would someone be sure, without knowing how they would apply something in practice, what to establish in the first place? But I also wanted to avoid being constrained at the outset by knowing too much about how it would finally work.

Another lesson I first learned in Sydney, from exploring the history of the Opera House, was that innovations in architecture can mean figuring out some of...