Acknowledgments
The idea for this book was conceived many years ago. At the time, however, the proposal of a societal architecture seemed purely academic, with unclear prospects for large-scale practical application of a society-wide approach to information system architecture.
Fortunately, significant progress has been made in a number of areas in recent years.
In international development, the post-2015 process in particular has triggered a much more inclusive global discourse on development challenges. Today, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the accompanying Addis Ababa Action Agenda require portfolio thinking and an enterprise architect’s perspective. The proposed Collaborative Planning and Investment Methodology and the society-wide Enterprise Architecture approach aim to meet this need.
Enterprise Architects have to deal with many concepts and views that come from different disciplines. The ArchiMate standard, the Archi modelling tool, and the Common Approach to US Federal Enterprise Architecture have been very helpful in structuring and supporting the enterprise architecture discourse. ArchiMate provides a fairly complete set of concepts and views for representing the enterprise architecture models and ideas that I wanted to share with the reader. ArchiMate 2.1 has added Motivation and Implementation and Migration extensions. The Common Approach to Federal Enterprise Architecture has shown awareness and introduced jargon for dealing with multiple levels of scope, it has expressed general principles for dealing with enterprise architecture in “partnerships”, and it has defined a concise collaborative planning methodology that has influenced the methodology presented in this e-book.
A third area I must acknowledge is the availability of open source tools and software. We know that the majority of the target beneficiaries of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development are resource-constrained, but they also need online content and tools to clarify their own needs and launch their own digital initiatives. Open source and tool support for such work is invaluable. In terms of wikis, I would like to mention wikidot.com and wiki.js. Mastodon is an open source alternative to X (earlier Twitter). In addition, the ability to add actionable models to an e-book adds a lot of value to the reader. Archi is a free tool that supports the rapid creation of coherent and consistent ArchiMate models. Modelio is an open source ArchiMate, UML and BPMN modeller that also supports integration specifications, and Leanpub is the publishing platform through which this e-book is offered. To the creators of Wikidot.com, Wiki.js, Mastodon, Archi, Modelio, Leanpub and Notepad++: you have all done a great job!
Digital commons activism, scholarship and policy proposals are a fourth area. A societal architecture is a digital commons where the resources are data, information, culture and knowledge created and/or maintained online. Societal architecture supports an ecology of interoperable portfolios, programs and projects.
My thanks go to everyone who has contributed to the above initiatives in an official, contractual or voluntary capacity. Without their enthusiasm, insight and commitment, this book would have been impossible to write.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my wife and our daughter for their love and patience.
the author, August 21, 2024
The ‘untrapped mind’ is open enough to see many possibilities, humble enough to learn from anyone and everything, perceptive enough to see things as they really are, and wise enough to judge their true value.
Komusuke Matsushita