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These days, managing enterprise information systems can feel like roller skating on an aircraft carrier: change is the only constant. Evolving markets, dynamic business demands, and emerging and obsolescing technologies challenge the wherewithal of IT planners.

• By Cass Brewer
• 09/15/05

These days, managing enterprise information systems can feel like roller skating on an aircraft carrier: change is the only constant. Evolving markets, dynamic business demands, and emerging and obsolescing technologies challenge the wherewithal of IT planners. Just when you think you’ve found your footing, a business merger or new regulation comes along to reset your priorities.

How can IT managers maintain equilibrium in a constantly shifting environment? This is the question that the authors of Dynamic Enterprise Architecture: How to Make It Work attempt to answer. The book’s title refers to an architectural model designed specifically to anticipate and embrace change.

The Dynamic Enterprise Architecture (DYA) model does not recommend or advise on any particular architecture. Instead, it is essentially a guide for developing more useful IT architectures that are closely tied to business practices and goals.

Specifically, DYA involves high-level collaboration between business and IT managers; integration and awareness of architectural principles across the organization; standards based, “just-enough, just-in-time” development; strategic mechanisms for handling deliberate noncompliance with standard architecture; and the use of templates and planning gadgets to facilitate the integration of business and IT.

Fundamental to the model is the notion that architectural principles should be standardized, promoted, and consistently executed across the enterprise; however, one of the more interesting aspects of the DYA model—and the book—is the recognition that companies should occasionally set aside architectural standards in order to react rapidly to emergent opportunities and challenges.

Sarbanes-Oxley financial reporting legislation is a good recent example, although it’s not specifically cited in the book. Faced with heavy demands under tight deadlines, many IT teams have opted to circumvent the heavy machinery of business cases and impact analyses in favor of agile solutions that meet immediate goals. As the DYA authors point out, such “development without architecture” is not in itself a problem—but when anomalous systems are maintained or expanded, they become an organizational burden.

To support agility without undermining architectural coherence, DYA recommends parallel, standards-compliant development and planned obsolescence of “rogue” systems. Obviously, this requires at least organizational discipline. In many cases, it requires a profound shift in corporate philosophy.

Presenting such a sweeping vision as DYA has its own challenges, which the book only partly overcomes. At just over 200 pages, plus a few appendices, the book is a fast read, despite the complexity of its thesis. It could easily be snack reading, save that many of its ideas are fairly ingenious. On the whole, the book is written with the same easy authority that allowed Albert Einstein to so blithely add the word “obviously” before many sentences in Relativity: The Special and the General Theory.

Eight short chapters contain accessible prose cut into bite-size chunks by subheads, illustrations, and sidebars. In what may be the book’s best feature, a number of practical tools, including a management “building permit” and a sample Balanced Scorecard, give body to otherwise abstract ideas. Often, it reads like a sort of Chilton Guide to do-it-yourself organizational utopia. The book’s premise is so methodically argued that it takes a while to realize it’s actually proposing a radical rewiring of the business/IT relationship—a feat that would often be difficult to drive from an internal position. Then you remember that the authors are consultants.

In fact, failing to define a specific audience might be the book’s greatest weakness. How and at what level to begin strategic conversations between IT and business managers is a perennial problem. Unfortunately, this book offers little insight on the topic. A section in the introduction deceptively titled “Target Audience” notes merely that the book is “for the person who asks himself: ‘How can I raise the level of architectural awareness and architectural integration in my organization to the extent that IT will be used to better effect?’” A more useful question might be “With whom does it start?” Regrettably, the authors chose to write their chapter on governance, which could have provided a direct answer, almost entirely in the coy passive voice—e.g., “This should start with a decision taken by the organization to work under architectures.”

The book also generally suffers from theory-itis, a painful deficiency of specific or real-world examples. The notable omission in a book geared toward practical application is aggravated by the authors’ decision to illustrate their argument with a fictional company struggling to launch its first e-commerce Web site. Compared to the average public company’s struggle with Sarbanes-Oxley section 404 reporting requirements, the fictional TeleBel has it easy: its challenges are applicable to the DYA model, but its quaint premise limits its relevance to current business challenges. Although the book was released in English this year, musty phrases such as “Information Superhighway” are jarring reminders that it was first printed (in Dutch) in 2001 and
wasn’t updated for its U.S. release.

At the end of the day, Dynamic Enterprise Architecture is an innovative, well-written, and relevant work despite its flaws. As the reach and the complexity of IT environments grow, companies must increasingly move to standardize, align, and integrate IT and business processes. This book presents one of the few architectural models that validates the role and reality of non-standards-based development within a broader architectural framework. Moreover, it belongs to a limited genre that offers a comprehensive vision backed by tangible tools for its realization.

Cass Brewer is editorial and research director for the IT Compliance Institute. cbrewer@itcinstitute.com

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