EA is like City Planning

In recent discussions about the purpose of EA in business I brought back an old metaphor: that of EA as the "city planning" process. It's an old metaphor in the sense that I first heard it used in the late 1980's to set Enterprise Architecture off against Solutions Architecture, for example, with SA seen as the architecture of the individual buildings and EA as the architecture of the city areas those buildings are part of. It is an interesting metaphor that - in my opinion - gives some useful insights and directions to a profession still very much in search of a clear definition of itself.

The metaphore compares the enterprise to a city: a complex organisation of people, locations, functions, services and infrastructure. To thrive and grow the city must provide its residents (both private and corporate) with facilities such as water, power and waste disposal, transportation infrastructure, support for constructive activities and protection against destructive ones. Moreover, the city council must plan and manage the city so it develops a sustainable and encouraging mix of residential, industrial, agricultural, recreational and natural zones that together cater - in a balanced and mutually reinforcing way - for all the myriad functions and services a healthy city requires; without actually providing most of those functions and services directly, since that is usually left to private and corporate initiatives and developments.

Likewise, the EA looks at the enterprise as a whole and plans the facilities, infrastructure, functions, services, support and protection the enterprise requires to grow and develop.

To do so, the EA must have both a thorough understanding of the inner workings of the enterprise in its current state and an equally or more thorough understanding of the direction the enterprise is heading and what that direction means in terms of future requirements and needs. As with city planning, since creating the future infrastructure and services takes time (months and often years), waiting with creating them until those needs and requirements have fully manifested themselves is not a sustainable strategy. Instead, the EA is constantly looking ahead and planning for the enterprise to be.

This is not an easy feat and most certainly not a linear or even entirely rational process. Like a city, an enterprise is subject to a large number of forces influencing its direction and development: internal forces such as available intellectual, financial and production captial, internal politics and cultural trends; and external forces such as competition, legislation, regulations, national and international politics and socio-economic developments. All these forces push and pull the enterprise in any number of directions. Rather than being able to predict exactly where the enterprise will be at any given moment in the future a good EA develops a sense of which of the possible future states are a) most likely to come true and b) most in line with the enterprise's vision and strategies, as directed by its executives and directors. It is then the EA's task to plan and design the high level architecture that will best prepare the enterprise for those most likely future states, including the flexibility to adapt and change direction as the future unfolds.

There is a curious paradox hidden in this process: by sensing and assessing the most likely and appropriate future states and then planning to provide for those, the EA (like the city planner) is not just following the trends but in a very real way setting and solidifying them. Where a possible direction may be just a theoretical possibility, when the EA starts planning and 'architecting' for that direction, the enterprise will more strongly lean towards it, discarding alternatives the more concrete the architecture becomes.

And herein lies the greatest responsibility of the EA. Her task is not 'simply' aligning the enterprise's assets and structures with that enterprise's current and future needs - that would imply the EA has no influence on the enterprise's future state and direction and is just a passive 'follower of fashion' and provider of services to an enterprise that is wholly determined by forces and determinants outside her. Instead, in the complex environment of the enterprise, there is no such passive role: every decision the EA makes influences the direction of the enterprise and even the act of observing and analysing the enterprise in motion can change the course of what is being observed.

This means that the best EAs are constantly looking ahead, trying to see patterns and trends in what happens inside and outside the enterprise and extrapolating those patterns and trends to possible directions and future states the enterprise is likely to reach. Based on that extrapolation the EA then has to make the choices that set direction as much as follows it; that shape the future as much as prepare for it; that create new strategic imperatives as much as align with existing business strategies; and - most important of all - that create facilities, infrastructure, support and services for what the future enterprise needs before it needs it, rather than wait till the need is there. As long as Enterprise Architecture is seen as a "follower" rather than a "co-creator", the products of the EA will always come too late, be less than the enterprise needs at any given moment and too much of what it doesn't need.