The Enterprise Terrain

Jeff Tash has an article on EACommunity.com (via Olov Åstberg) in which he says that ”enterprise architecture strives to bridge the gap between business executives and technical experts,” and that to implement an enterprise architecture¹, one has to begin by focusing on the “terrain,” much as “an architect designing a house” does.

It’s critical that enterprise architects understand what they have to work with, not simply what they want as a final result.

This means, Tash writes, getting a picture of all the hardware and software owned and used by the enterprise. The people involved, non-technical as well as IT people, must “share a common view of their common terrain.”

He talks about creating visual images of “the entirety of IT” in an enterprise, a “graphical representation of IT Infrastructure,” or a “cognitive roadmap.” He calls these pictures “IT roadmaps,” and he writes that has examples of them on his personal web site (registration required). I haven’t looked closely at them yet, but his article reminds me of David West’s paper on the system metaphor in Extreme Programming, in which he discusses using a visual image inspired by the Tibetan Wheel of Life.

¹ Which is something, Tash writes, “sixty percent of [the companies on the Forbes Global 2000 list]” have yet to do.