- Founding documents that everyone references, such as Zachman's 1987 paper for the IBM Systems Journal, and the MIT book on Enterprise Architecture as Strategy.
- Various summaries and guides to the body of knowledge. Mitre produced a guide to the (evolving) EA body of knowledge around 2004 (known as EABOK), and there is a bunch of people currently trying to produce a new version of the EABOK. The BCS has published a Reference Model for Enterprise and Solution Architecture, which it uses as the basis for its architecture certification.
- Some standards, such as ISO/IEC 42010 and RM/ODP.
- Various frameworks that package this knowledge into some kind of semi-formal framework, such as TOGAF and DODAF/MODAF, as well as the Zachman framework. The Federal EA framework is incorporated into US law via the Clinger-Cohen Act.
- Various tools that encapsulate portions of this knowledge.
- Some attempts to formalize and ground this knowledge. There is some interesting work in the defence community to produce an EA ontology (MODEM) to replace the existing MODAF/DODAF metamodel. Meanwhile, there is a growing academic literature, much of it from the Netherlands for some reason.
- Huge amounts of commentary and proposed additions/revision by individual authors and bloggers. There is also a considerable admixture of insight and obfuscation from the large consultancies and analyst firms.
The body of knowledge as a whole can be understood as a set of definitions ("this is what we shall call a business function"), assertions and observations ("loosely coupled structures are more flexible"), instructions/injunctions ("always agree your principles before planning your systems"), and examples (mostly artificial or anecdotal), together with a bunch of rather spurious or irrelevant claims ("this is a mathematically proven technique", "this classification was invented by the ancient Greeks", "this is what everybody means by 'complexity' "). The body of knowledge also relies significantly on some terms that usually remain undefined, such as "alignment".
This body of knowledge as a whole has been subject to a number of criticisms.
- It is incomplete, inconsistent, imprecise, muddled, simplistic.
- It is impractical, fails to deliver value, not fit for purpose (however that purpose may be understood).
- It carries a hidden ideological agenda (which conveniently suits the commercial interests of the large software and IT services companies).
- It lacks a proper base of empirical evidence - much of the knowledge is received wisdom and rehashed fragments from other sources.
- It relies on "subject matter experts", who often have no experience or training in knowledge research and are merely trading their own preconceptions.
In response to these perceived flaws in the collective body of knowledge, many EA practitioners espouse a personal body of knowledge, which is smaller and hopefully more consistent than the conventional/collective body of knowledge. This personal body of knowledge is often presented explicitly as an alternative to the conventional body of knowledge, for example rants against TOGAF or Zachman. However, personal bodies of knowledge are not immune from the same criticisms, and often suffer from methodological syncretism.
How has the collective body of knowledge been developed and validated? Typically a combination of the following
- This is what everybody knows.
- This is what every good architect knows.
- Here's an interesting new idea, so let's bung it in somewhere.
- Our customers like it, so it must be right.
- This bit of TOGAF is obviously rubbish, so let's chuck it away and put something else in its place.
Imre Lakatos said that a research programme can be progressive or degenerative. A progressive research programme is one that enhances the explanatory or predictive power of a body of knowledge. (For example, the development of new medical knowledge is progressive if and only if it clearly contributes to more effective healthcare.) A degenerative research programme is one that merely adjusts the body of knowledge to explain away inconvenient results. (Hubert Dreyfus has argued that AI was a degenerative research programme, because it ran into unexpected problems it could not solve.) I have frequently observed that much of EA looks more like mediaeval scholasticism (taxonomy for the sake of taxonomy) than modern science.
I know that some of the readers of this blog aspire to push forward the EA body of knowledge in various ways, including the next version of TOGAF and the replacement EABOK - so my challenge to you guys is this: How are you making sure that your work is progressive and evidence-based?
4 comments:
Hi Richard,
I responded to your tweet with a post of my own.
http://eabok.org/node/52
--- Nick
Reading Nick Malik's thoughtful response on the EABOK-2 website Is the EABOK progressive and evidence based?, I accept that I may have jumped to conclusions about the EABOK-2 goals.
There are three possible goals for the EABOK-2 initiative. The first is to create new EA knowledge. The second is to "curate" EA knowledge - in other words, to create a collection of the best bits of existing knowledge. And the third is simply to create a guide to what exists, without attempting to evaluate it.
I should also explain further what I mean by "body of knowledge". Nick says the medical profession does NOT have a single body of knowledge, but I think it makes sense to talk about the collective knowledge of the medical profession, perhaps even including alternative practices, as an extremely large body of knowledge, which may well contain all sorts of conflicting ideas. I take the term "Guide to THE body of knowledge" to imply both (a) that there is a single sprawling body of knowledge contained in any number of documents as well as practitioners' heads, and (b) that EABOK-1 and EABOK-2 are two different guides to this body of knowledge. If I look on Amazon I can find many guides to China, but presumably there is only one China.
Now, if I'm writing a guide to China, I may attempt to write a purely factual guide, with no subjective judgement. For example, I may decide to include every city above a certain size. Or I may wish to write a subjective guide, in which I try to select the most interesting or beautiful cities. I don't think the authors of EABOK-2 have got this choice - the selection is inevitably going to be based on some collective editorial judgement about the validity and importance of the ideas included.
And there is another difference between writing a guide to China (which probably doesn't significantly affect the reality of China) and writing a guide to a body of knowledge, which if successful will become incorporated into that body of knowledge.
Any guide needs to be helpful and accurate, but I think a guide to a body of knowledge should also contribute to improving the body of knowledge as a whole. I am having second thoughts about whether this counts as research, and therefore whether it is fair to apply Lakatos's notion of a progressive research programme to the EABOK-2 initiative itself. It may be more more appropriate for the EABOK-2 authors to use Lakatos's criterion when deciding which bits of EA research to include in the guide. This would send an important message to EA researchers (in the same way that curators of art exhibitions inevitably influence the work of living artists) and would therefore influence the future development of EA knowledge.
Nick asserts a principle that each contribution to the guide should be progressive and evidence-based, but of course this is not the same as saying that the guide as a whole will be progressive and evidence-based. As every architect should know (ironic smile), the qualities of the whole are not simply a function of the qualities of the parts.
EABOK-2's success will depend on attracting a broad community of contributors, and within that a strong sub-set of people whose intellectual bias is, as you say, fact based and progressive.
Medicine is an interesting and perhaps apt analogue because while we may assume the clinical efficacy of medice is grounded in the rigorous application of basic medical science, in fact, many advances in medicine have been made through clinical praxsis.
The simple fact of the matter in our profession is there is currently no citadel. There are no established organs of professional quality and practice that provide for a framework of peer review and a progressive collegial discourse.
The field is awash with hero-philosophers who far from providing tempered and tested solutions, are more concerned with colonising and defining the problem domain. To which, of course, their approach is the most rational answer. And I confess to falling prey to that aspect of my own temperament.
In the not too distant past - less than half a human lifetime - it was clear that universities were the institutions that provided the body-of-knowledge function. In concert with professional, government, and industry bodies of course, but universities provided the central coordinating and legitimising function.
I am the first to acknowledge we are moving into the post-University age as the internet has opened up radically different ways for society to create, collated and codify knowledge.
But while this is the case, the higher education sector has, and will have a crucial role to play in the establishment of genuine 'bodies of knowledge" that are tested by a body of qualified peers and backed up by objective, open and publicly challengeable, evidence based research. For a start they have money, and a sustained infrastructure specifically set aside for such activity. And while far from perfect, they have generations of experience in proving knowledge.
I am keen to contribute constructively to any attempt to codify, improve and share the knowledge of how enterprise architecture is done. But I must confess, this blind spot within the profession eludes me.
I cannot see why initiatives like the EABOK-2 do not consider the involvement of higher education in such endeavours to be mandatory.
Thanks Ric
For much of the history of medicine, innovation depended on brilliant individuals taking huge risks with their patients' lives. Medicine has now developed some fairly strict knowledge protocols, so everyone can perceive the difference between a promising idea and a proven approach. Whereas in enterprise architecture, the word "proven" generally means "I talked to someone at a conference who told me it has worked at least once".
Meanwhile, the universities and business schools have a tendency to produce a lot of fragmented and often intellectually shallow work. (Any academics reading this are welcome to regard themselves as worthy exceptions to this trend.) Much of the serious research in systems architecture and related topics has taken place outside or at arm's length from universities, in R&D labs funded by the computer and telecoms companies, and by the US government.
Nonetheless, involving higher education in initiatives such as EABOK-2 ought to help the whole community (including the academics) to become more joined-up, more practically grounded and of course evidence-based, and I agree that such involvement is to be encouraged.
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