12 Heuristics for Enterprise Architecting

photo credits: i k o

Lessons learnt as I reflect on a recent four-month Enterprise Architecting (EA) exercise.   In the exercise, a 4-person team helped an organization map out where the organization was at, where it wanted to be and how it could get there.

Each lesson is captured as a heuristic, a rule of thumb that I want to remember so that I can use it to guide me for future projects.  They are not truths, and will get refined with more experience and insight.  I definitely hope to hear your experiences that relate to these heuristics, regardless of whether they support or invalidate a heuristic.

What made this EA exercise interesting is that, though it is not my first EA exercise, it is the first one I took a lead role in.  Also, this exercise made use of a methodology new to me, from MIT course “Enterprise Architecting” taught by Professor Deborah Nightingale and Dr. Donna Rhodes. In addition, ideas from the book “Enterprise Architecture as Strategy” also crept into the EA exercise, as I was concurrently attending a class by the book's co-author Dr. Jeanne Ross. 

Here are the heuristics I have distilled so far.  I will write about each of them, and complete the list as I go along.

1. Looking for gaps? Push from top, guide from bottom
2. Guess, Validate, Iterate: Time-bound architectural efforts
3. Talk to more blind man to know the elephant
4. Collect and analyze data with reusability in mind
5. Address the concern of “you are echoing back what I told you”
6. Examine if the metrics are frequent and granular enough to be actionable