A Contextual Application Of Enterprise Architecture Principles

The division of labour in enterprise IT is gaining grounds as we see the use of key words in various job descriptions and HR activities. Today the profiles for Architects, Analysts, Designers, Developers, Testers, Project Manager and System Administrators are becoming clearer and professionalised.

While this division of labour is in alignment with the principles of enterprise architecture, wherein various aspects of the enterprise are broken down into discrete building blocks, then meticulously develop the various building blocks and integrate them into a functional system, applying these principles come with a bundle of challenges. Delivery management in the context of human, financial and technology resource fluctuations can be very challenging.

Such challenges are triggers stimulating managers to act against conventional wisdom in the name of “firefighting”. Think of the hilarious laughter when a manager gets a specialist developer to writing architectural or design specifications. Now put a smile on your face and remember that Information Technology is ubiquitous and dynamic. A specialist can always break a daily grind by venting into something different. You can have some fun by writing some “Test Cases”. The fun is: Specialist testers can break their daily grind by writing some “Test Cases” to test their Test-Output.

In effect the concepts of specialising generalists and generalising specialists may hamper the contextual application of Enterprise Architecture principles. To mitigate the risks of improvisational usage of these concepts, they should be carefully integrated into any endeavour to realise sustainable enterprise architectures.