Frederick Vanbrabant's Delirious Rantings

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Systems Thinking in Enterprise Architecture

Strategy , Enterprise architecture , Managing information

I first learned of systems thinking in the domain of city planning, and that is apparently also where the idea comes from. It was described to me in the context of building new residential buildings and effects on local bird populations. Birds don’t always perceive glass clearly, especially when it’s a tall apartment building and on their flight path. So there are birds that think they can pass under an arch, yet instead fly straight into a glass wall.

The middle ground between canonical models and data mesh

Enterprise architecture , Managing information , Organizational layer

Some years ago I worked with a scale-up that was really focused on the way they handled data in their product. They extensively argued over data language, had value objects everywhere, explicit models and, even hexagonal architecture. It was a cool place to work, with a lot of smart people. At some point they started to talk about standardizing their data transfer objects, the data that flows over the API connections, in these common models. The idea was that there would be a single Invoice, User, Customer concept that they can document, standardize and share over their entire application landscape.

The death of the enterprise service bus was greatly exaggerated

Enterprise architecture , Application layer , Infrastructure

Every six months or so I read a post on sites like Hackernews that the enterprise service bus concept is dead and that it was a horrible concept to begin with. Yet I personally have great experiences with them, even in large, messy enterprise landscapes. I would go even further and say that I see a resurgence in their usage in big enterprises. Even companies that moved away from them seem to have a renewed appetite. Sometimes they are rebranded as integration platforms / iPaaS, but they are still very much the thing under the hood.

Bring back opinionated architecture

Solution architecture , Managing technology , Organizational layer

Before my end-of-year holiday break, I received an email 1 from someone who read my post about “Choosing your starting line in enterprise architecture”. Mark asked me what I meant by the line: So yes, you can map the AS-IS. You can design the TO-BE. You can even claim you’re doing both, which is the classic architect escape hatch.

What is a Value Stream and how does it relate to a Value Chain

Enterprise architecture , Strategy layer , Strategy

Organizations often use “value stream” and “value chain” as interchangeable labels. It’s not the biggest architectural drama in the world, but it’s still something that always annoys me a little. We as architects might actually be to blame for this. We keep on coming up with related concepts that are very close to each other and then naming them ever so slightly differently.

Choosing your starting line in enterprise architecture

Enterprise architecture , Business layer , Strategy layer

I’ve been part of the creation of five enterprise architecture offices in my life. Some I’ve led, others I’ve simply been part of. If you start up an enterprise architecture office, you have two types of strategies people use. Some people start by mapping everything that exists, in whatever state it happens to be. They then assess what they have and start building a gap analysis towards a better, more uniform state.

The CMDB as an architecture source

Enterprise architecture , Managing information , Managing technology

Every company that I’ve helped start their enterprise architecture practice so far, always tell me that they might not have architecture setup yet, but they do have a ton of information in the CMDB that we can use to kickstart the exercise. The CMDB is our source of truth of all the applications, servers, and it’s all linked to service lines and capabilities. Furthermore, it’s maintained by a team and it’s fully ITIL aligned. It’s a treasure trove!

Architectural debt is not just technical debt

Enterprise architecture , Application layer , Business layer , Strategy layer

When I was a developer, half of our frustrations were about technical debt (the other were about estimates that are seen as deadlines). We always made a distinction between code debt and architecture debt: code debt being the temporary hacks you put in place to reach a deadline and never remove, and architectural debt being the structural decisions that come back to bite you six months later.

Nemawashi and the Meta of Meetings

People , Strategy

A few weeks ago I walked into a meeting room to discuss my solution to a fork in the road problem. We’ve been roadblocked for two weeks with two clear paths forward. One of them I preferred; a bit more work, but it would bring dividends in the future and not burden us with a less than ideal solution. The other way forward was what a different group wanted: to push the project through so they could reach the deadline.

Solution designs should only be a few pages

Solution architecture , Application layer , Managing information

Architects always get a bad rap when it comes to design documents. We get blamed for delivering these massive solution design documents that take weeks to produce, eat into the time for development and in the end result into an encyclopedia that nobody reads. The architectural drive to document and cover as much as possible naturally evolves into templates that are in the 40–50 pages (template alone).