Who Should Read This Book?

The principles and practice described here apply to every type of enterprise – for-profit, not-for-profit, government, whatever – and at every scale, from a global corporation all the way down to the local school’s sports-club. So in principle, and in practice too, it should be relevant to just about everyone.

This book should be especially useful for enterprise and business architects, but also for executives, strategists, strategic analysts, and any others who are tasked with understanding the enterprise as a whole.

Enterprise-architectures provide a “big-picture” overview for other architecture disciplines: so this would also be useful for process architects, security architects, solution architects, software architects, and the like.

What’s in This Book?

The aim of this book is to show what actually needs to happen in enterprise-architecture practice – not just its outcomes, but the activities from which those outcomes arise. As part of this, the book introduces a new technique called “context-space mapping,” which provides a structured method for sensemaking across the entire context of an enterprise. There’s also a strong emphasis here on what building-architects describe as “meta-thinking” – the reflective “thinking about thinking” through which the quality of personal practice is developed.

We’ll use the project-diary for records, notes, sketch-diagrams, and anything else we’d need to document as we go along.

There are also various comments, anecdotes, asides, and examples – again drawn from real business practice – which are shown as follows:

A story, anecdote, or aside provides a real-world example of the point that’s being discussed in the main text.

Most books on enterprise-architecture and the like will include many illustrative models and diagrams, and this too follows that tradition. What’s different here is that many of these diagrams are adapted straight from the sketch-pad or whiteboard, to emphasize that this book is all about what happens in real-world practice.

The architecture activities for this second project are described in a separate section in the later part of each day’s chapter.

Each of those chapters ends with another section that provides suggestions for how to apply the same principles in your own architecture work.

There are also two additional chapters after the overall projects. The first of these describes the structures of the information-repositories needed for enterprise-architecture, and summarizes the respective content for each. The second of these two chapters provides more detail on context-space mapping, with some additional examples of cross-maps that can be useful in specific types of sensemaking. And finally there’s an appendix that lists the various resources referenced within the book.

That’s the overall structure of what follows. But the clock’s already ticking on this architecture-project: time to get started.