I have been fortunate to participate in the Enterprise Architecture summer school that took place in week 31 in year 2012 at the IT University of Copenhagen. There where a lot of interesting presenters, academics and practitioners. One of the more notable presenters where Martin van den Berg who happens to be one of the authors to the book “Dynamic Architecture: How to make it work” and “Establishing an enterprise architecture practice”.

Furthermore came a lot of presenters from Finland who had researched the concept of Enterprise Architecture and a chief architect from a major Finnish/German Corporation.

This particular blog post was written in order to give you some insight in what happened with one of the presentations and I plan to release more blog posts dealing with the thoughts I have had during and after the summer school.

Innovation for Enterprise Architecture

The presenter, Mr. Kim Peiter Joergensen, argued that the enterprise architecture program has had little impact on the business. One of the reasons for this was the way that the enterprise architects usually developed their business artifacts. That triggered reactions from most of the practitioners who attended the summer school and as a consequence the keynote turned from being a presentation to a debate.

I was not particular impressed by the rather true, but rather stereotypical ideas of how enterprise architecture has impacted the organizations ability to invent and produce new products. From my perspective it really depends on how the organization and the chief architect approaches the concept of innovation and for that matter the concept of inventing.  Mr. Kim Peiter Joergensen should have worked with his preliminary (definitions and principles) for what invention and innovation is in an enterprise architecture context and that could have improved his presentation quite dramatically.

I believe that innovation is about identifying inventions (e.g. software, concepts, methodologies etc.) and identifying their fitness for adaption in the enterprise and its business, application and technological architecture. One example of this could be an enterprise architecture function that handles and develops the technology strategy.

In despite of the rather alternative way of defining enterprise architecture and invention or innovation, Mr. Kim Peiter Joergensen’s presentation did develop some ideas of how to approach this particular issue. First of all an exploration of the topic would have to be dealt with through defining the perspectives and how innovation and the concept of inventing.

Observations

The Enterprise Architecture function can enable the time to implementation (and essentially market) by developing and maintaining a technology strategy where the architects identifies new technologies and concepts that can be implemented in the organization.

The Enterprise Architecture function can enable standardization that makes it possible for the various applications to communicate with one another and as a consequence ensure a faster implementation rate of processes, software and concepts.

The Enterprise Architecture function can identify needs for reengineering of the structure of the organization’s structure.