Transcript of a BriefingsDirect sponsored podcast with Len Fehskens. Recorded live at The Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in Seattle, Washington.

1. 'Fit for Purpose' Presents New Challenges for Enterprise
Architecture
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect sponsored podcast with Len Fehskens. Recorded live at The Open
Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in Seattle, Washington.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript.
Sponsor:The Open Group.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re
listening to BriefingsDirect. .
Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion coming to you from The Open
Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in Seattle, the week of
February 1, 2010.
We're going to take a look at the definition of enterprise architecture (EA), the
role of the architect and how that might be shifting. We're here with an expert from the Open
Group, Len Fehskens, Vice President of Skills and Capabilities. Welcome to the show.
Len Fehskens: Thanks, Dana.
Gardner: I was really intrigued by your presentation, talking, with a great deal of forethought
obviously, about the whole notion of EA, the role of the architect, this notion of "fit for purpose."
We should probably take our discussion to that. We want to have the fit-for-purpose discussion
about EA. The way to start that is to ask what are the essential characteristics of this new
definition.
Fehskens: You'll remember that one of the things I hoped to do with this definition was
understand the architecture of architecture and that the definition would basically
be the architecture of architecture. The meme, so to speak, for this definition is
the idea that architecture is about three things: mission, solution, and
environment. Both the mission and the solution exist in the environment, and the
purpose of the architecture is to specify essentials that address fitness for
purpose.
There are basically five words or phrases; mission, solution, environment, fitness
for purpose, and essentials. Those capture all the ideas behind the definition of
architecture.
Gardner: The whole notion of EA has been in works for 30 years, as you pointed out. What is it
about right now in the maturity of IT and the importance of IT in modern business that makes
this concept of enterprise architect so important?

2. Fehskens: A lot of practicing enterprise architects have realized that they can't do enterprise IT
architecture in isolation anymore. The constant mantra is "business-IT alignment." In order to
achieve business-IT alignment, architects need some way of understanding what the business is
really about. So, coming from an architectural perspective, it becomes natural to think of
specifying the business in architectural terms.
Enterprise architects are now talking more frequently about the idea of "business architecture."
The question becomes, "What do we really mean by business architecture?" We keep saying that
it's the stakeholders who really define what's going on. We need to talk to business people to
understand what the business architecture is, but the business people don't want to talk tech-
speak.
We need to be able to talk to them in their language, but addressing an architectural end. What I
tried to do was come up with a definition of architecture and EA that wasn't in tech-speak. That
would allow business people to relate to concepts that make sense in their domain. At the same
time, it would provide the kind of information that architects are looking for in understanding
what the architecture of the business is, so that they can develop an EA that supports the needs of
the business.
Gardner: So, in addition to defining EA properly for this time and place, and with the hindsight
of the legacy, development, and history of IT and now business, what is the special sauce for a
person to be able to fill that role? It’s not just about the definition, but it's also about the
pragmatic analog world, day-in and day-out skills and capabilities.
Borrowed skills
Fehskens: That's a really good question. I've had this conversation with a lot of architects, and
we all pretty much agree that maybe 90 percent of what an architect
does involves skills that are borrowed from other disciplines --
program management, project management, governance, risk
management, all the technology stuff, social skills, consulting skills,
presentation skills, communication skills, and all of that stuff.
But, even if you’ve assembled all of those skills in a single individual, there is still something
that an architect has to be able to do to take advantage of those capabilities and actually do
architecture and deliver on the needs of their clients or their stakeholders.
I don't think we really understand yet exactly what that thing is. We’ve been okay so far, because
people who entered the discipline have been largely self-selecting. I got into it because I wanted
to solve problems bigger than I could solve myself by writing all code. I was interested in having
a larger impact then I could just writing a single program or doing something that was something
that I could do all by myself.
That way, we filter out people who try to become architects. Then, there's a second filter that
applies: if you don't do it well, people don't let you do it. We're now at the point where people are

3. saying, "That model for finding, selecting, and growing architects isn't going to work anymore,
and we need to be more proactive in producing and grooming architects." So, what is it that
distinguishes the people who have that skill from the people who don't?
If you go back to the definition of architecture that I articulated in this talk, one of the things that
becomes clear is that an architect not only has to have good design skills. An architect also has to
be almost Sherlock Holmes-like in his ability to infer from all kinds of subtle signals what really
matters, what's really important to the stakeholders, and how to balance all of these different
things in a way that ends up focusing on an answer to this very squishily, ill-defined statement of
the problem.
This person, this individual, needs to have that sense of the big picture -- all of the moving parts
-- but also needs to be able to drill in both at the technical detail and the human detail.
In fact, this notion of fitness for purpose comes back in. As I said before, an architect has to be
able to figure out what matters, not only in the development of an architectural solution to a
problem, but in the process of discerning that architecture. There's an old saw about a sculptor.
Somebody asked him, "How did you design this beautiful sculpture," and he says, "I didn't. I just
released it from the stone."
What a good architect does is very similar to that. The answer is in there. All you have to is find
it. In some respects, it's not so much a creative discipline, as much as it's an exploratory or
searching kind of discipline. You have to know where to look. You have to know which questions
to ask and how to interpret the answers to them.
Rarely done
Gardner: One of the things that came out early in your presentation was this notion that
architecture is talked about and focused on, but very rarely actually done. If it's the case in the
real world that there is less architecture being done than we would think is necessary, why do it
at all?
Fehskens: There's a lot of stuff being done that is called architecture. A lot of that work, even if
it's not purely architecture in the sense that I've defined architecture, is still a good enough
approximation so that people are getting their problems solved.
What we're looking for now, as we aspire to professionalize the discipline, is to get to the point
where we can do that more efficiently, more effectively, get there faster, and not waste time on
stuff that doesn't really matter.
I'm reminded of the place medicine was 100 or 150 years ago. I hate to give leeches a bad name,
because we’ve actually discovered that they're really useful in some medical situations. But,
there was trepanning, where they cut holes in a person's skull to release vapors, and things like
that. A lot of what we are doing in architecture is similar.

4. We do stuff because it's the state of the art and other people have tried it. Sometimes, it works
and sometimes, it doesn't. What we want to do is get better at that, so that we pick the right
things to do in the right situations, and the odds of them actually working are much higher than
better than chance.
Gardner: Okay, a last question. Is there anything about this economic environment and the
interest in cloud computing and various sourcing options and alternatives that make the
architecture role all the more important?
Fehskens: I hate to give you the typical architect signature which is, "Yes, but." Yes, but I don't
think that's a causal a relationship. It's sort of a coincidence. In many respects, architecture is the
last frontier. It's the thing that's ultimately going to determine whether or not an organization will
survive in an extremely dynamic environment. New technologies like cloud are just the latest
example of that environment changing radically.
It isn't so much that cloud computing makes good EA necessary, as much as cloud computing is
just the latest example of changes in the external environment that require organizations to have
enterprise architects to make sure that the organization is always fit for purpose in an extremely
dynamically changing environment.
Gardner: We have been talking about the newer definitions and maturing definitions of EA.
Joining us has been Len Fehskens, Vice President of Skills and Capabilities of The Open Group.
Thank you.
Fehskens: Thank you very much, Dana.
Gardner: This sponsored podcast discussion is coming to you from The Open Group's
Enterprise Architecture Practitioners conference in Seattle, the week of February 1, 2010.
I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to
BriefingsDirect. Thanks, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript.
Sponsor:The Open Group.
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect sponsored podcast with Len Fehskens. Recorded live at The Open
Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in Seattle, Washington. Copyright
Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.
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