Enterprise Architecture playground

Architects working together could sometimes be compared to small children in the playground. Totall chaos and one boy is grabbing the others childrens cars.

Still, if you are a grown up enterprise architect, you still need a playground or sandbox to learn and try out new things.

Very few enterprise architects are developers in their daily life, so the question is how you can experiment with new things outside development tools?

For me, my EA playground is my film production hobby, and the EA Case study a way to try out ways of working and new tools

Many of you are very focused on frameworks and tools, so I will now update the architecture documentation using new tools. The reason to this is a new legal entity in film production that have impact on the existing EA views.

Provide crew and film production is now one legal entity and film distribution is another entity.

I will use  a sandbox version of LeanIX to model the film production and film distribution business, to learn what you can do with the tools today.

What is your playground for Enterprise Architecture?

A physical sandbox

The last article about agile city planning was the joy of agile.

Now, we are in R&D mode, trying to learn how to create custom made platforms for the shadow station and the branch-line.

As this is something completely new for me, I've created a small diorama for experiments, e.g. a sandbox environment where I can learn, without messing up the larger layout.

This is the same reason, why you need a sandbox environment when doing something new with IT. A safe place to try and learn without messing up the large systems.

You can try new concepts within a limited cost, and scrap if it doesn’t work.

The same principle applies regardless it’s for creating contract tracks for feedback or doing an event based integration. If you haven’t done it before, you need a learning environment.

Information governance, why now?

A colleague asked me why information governance is more on everyone's mind now, compared to before. From my point of view, there are three reasons for this, but I would like to give some background information first.

When I begin my career as a programmer the mid 80's, I quickly learned the concept of garbage in, garbage out. Fast forward to the early 2000 when I begun using IAF v3, and modelling the information aspect in architecture. We already then talked about quality attributes for information and information ownership, but these topics were not prioritized.

Digitalization is the first main reason for increased need for information governance. With less people, and more integrations between systems, flaws in data quality will have more impact now, than when humans fixed the errors.

The second reason is regulations. More and more regulations are addressing data quality issues, from GDPR to DORA and everything related to cybersecurity.

Third, ever heard of AI? Without data quality, you are lucky if you get garbage out from your newfangled AI-solution, as it could get even worse, fast.

Here is the catch-22, try to do information governance without a proper information architecture? You appoint persons in your organization to have information ownership, without defining what this is. What you get is still garbage in, garbage out.

Learning from failures

If you work with EA, you could do a stellar job and but a strategy or transformation program would fail regardless of your effort. As an EA you don't walk alone, you work with teams in an organization. This role is not a one man/woman show.

Done more than 100 different assignments as an Enterprise Architect since 1998. Some shorter and some of them longer.

I have only a few really successful examples, but more grand failures. Mostly positive results when I have recommended stakeholders to close down large programs, or done due diligence to keep them confident to continue.

Learning from the failures is part of life as an architect. As a consultant, you often get those assignments nobody else would take, making it even harder to succed.

I often have a role as an external advisor, to give recommendations, and say what would go wrong if they don't follow my advice. If they neglect the advices, and the program fails, is this an EA failure or not?

If you don't have direct access to major stakeholders, CxO level or Business units in global organizations, then it's a bad sign from the start. Another mission impossible scenario is when all stakeholders have very different priorities.

Not invented here is another syndrome, especially when comming from the outside. A bad situation, becomming even worse if the chief architect is utterly incompetent.

In large transformation programs, failures are mostly related to the classic triangle of love. Budget, time and quality. As lead architect, you can recommend to close down, or help the program manager with prioritization and hopefully have the stakeholders to improve the pre-conditions.

If you want to do a career as an Enterprise Architect, expect huge challenges in your profession, and falling flat on the ground at regular intervals. If not your cup of tea, don't jump into the saddle.

Same when riding horses. You need to understand why you fall off, and learn from that.

Happy New Year to all of you.

Same, but different

When is a business capability too different to be treated in the same way between business units?

We start with supply-chain to see how different the capability is between film production, film distribution and provide crew & equipment.

Film distribution

To sell a film, you need a few type of resources

• Rights for distribution

• Media to distribute

• Promotional material

• Optional subtitles

Provide crew & equipment

To provide crew & equipment to customers, you don't need much more, but different type of resources.

• Crew

• Film equipment

• Promotional material

Film production

Then compare these two business units to film production where we need much more to purchase or rent for the actual production, and everything needs to be just-in-time.

• Script / synopsis with rights

• Actors & extras

• Crew

• Props

• Makeup & wardrobe

• Set design

• Locations

• Music / score (rights)

• Archive media

• Film equipment

Summary

Film distribution resources differs very much from resources for Film production and Provide crew & equipment. Provide crew & equipment is a subset of Film production, and use the same resources. The assumption is no overlap between production and distribution, except when we do live events.

Process fit

Our supply-chain process have not been prioritized so far, as we have been concentrating on film production per se. However, better supply-chain for film production lower the costs and delays in production. Thus, we need to improve in this area. Both for allocation of cast and crew, but also for everything else needed in productions, including logistics.

Working assumption is to start with supply-chain in standard APQC, but also using APQC Broadcast as reference, when defining a proper supply chain process for all business units.

Application support

Yamdu supports managing crew & cast, props, set design, media, etc, in production, but not the supply-chain part of ordering from suppliers. What we need is a system that manages items and stock levels, in interaction with Yamdu, as well as purchase orders.

This will work well for film production and provide crew & equipment. However, film distribution uses different data, processes are not the same and you different skills as an employee to manage distribution. From a business perspective, there are no benefits of using the same system as for film production, more of concerns as it's getting more complicated and with higher license costs.

Conclusion

From a supply-chain perspective, keep film distribution autonomous.