[Book Review] Enterprise Architecture As Strategy

Environments where many applications and many development teams must talk have an additional layer of complexity surrounding them.  The more integrated the applications have to become, the hairier it gets.  If this scenario sounds like the company you are at, there’s a good change this book will bring some clarity to your world view. 🙂

I would recommend making sure you are familiar with Enterprise Integration Patterns first, however.  Without some decent coverage of different Integration Topologies, it might be a bit hard to grasp the application of the material.

There were a number of things in this book that stood out to me.  The first was the authors’ introduction to four Operating Models: Unification, Coordination, Diversification, and Replication.  The four models correspond directly to the model through which the business works.  It’s important to note that the Operating Model is not determined by IT but should be selected during an engagement between IT and the business (sound familiar?) to determine how the business wants to grow and position itself.

Roughly speaking, there’s an interesting correlation between the Operating Models and the various Integration Topologies (Broker, Bus, Point-to-Point, etc).

There was a lot of focus on how processes differ across companies with different operating models.

I’m not going to go too deep into the rest of the book’s content, but I will say that it was a great read.  It was a bit lighter than some of the other techincal books on my bookshelf, so that was a welcome change.

If you are interested in reading a bit more on this topic, you can also check out Nick Malik’s series of posts on this same book/topic.