The first week
Previously I wrote about the ramp up towards the Enterprise Architecture in my company. I would like to continue on this topic by giving a short story on the first week.
In the past week I continued to tour the company explaining about enterprise architecture to make sure no one got excluded from that story. The reactions seemed positive and people look forward to it. So far the message was spread in the IT organisations as they were closest to me, always easier to speak to kindred spirits :) However, I know that a similar message has to be told to the business, but therefore I'll need a different text with the same meaning.
Starting the enterprise architecture is not something that is easily done. I consider that a lot of preparation is needed, but we still want to provide short term value. As said in the previous topic, a lot is about communication for us at the moment, connecting people. Openly discuss topics even across project boundaries and be transparently in that communication. Additionally we also need a better document management solution than a network share that just doesn’t cut it for this purpose.
Luckily the company just rolled out Office2010 and SharePoint, so I took advantage of the situation and immediately started populating all architectural artefacts that I knew off into SharePoint. The intent is to attribute all documents in their based on the TOGAF meta model so that we can use SharePoint as kind of an architecture repository and a communication channel at once.
Besides setting up this environment, I did spent some time on the project level where I got invited by my colleague architects. They look forward to address the cross project concerns as they use to fall out of the equation at the end of the day. I do hope to find a way to gather and consolidate all these additional requirements and bring these forward to the Architecture forum (IT management) where they can be evaluated and perhaps even planned in the IT roadmap.
Next thing on the menu is a TOGAF course in the Netherlands that will hopefully provide me with a good deal of theoretical knowledge to take our Enterprise Architecture a step further.
Stay tuned :)