Foreword - Tom Graves

First things first: yes, read this book. Buy this book. If you’re involved in enterprise-architecture and business-transformation - and particularly if you’re just starting out on your career in those fields - then you need this book. Simple as that, really.

Why? Well, a bit of background first. I first met up with Kim perhaps a decade ago, when we were both working on a business-transformation project for a large logistics organisation in Australia. It was a major piece of work, setting up a true whole-of-enterprise transformation, not just IT-systems, but business-processes, culture, quality, skills, facilities, the lot. Importantly, it wasn’t just a one-off change-programme, but about creating a new capability, to assist the business to manage change overall in the longer-term in a more effective way.

And that’s really the point of enterprise-archecture: everything affects and depends on everything else. Without the clear view of that ‘the everything’ that an enterprise-architecture provides, the tendency is to fall back to a view of only the small subset that’s directly affected by a single change - and thence to a ‘local optimisation’ which might at first seem to work well from the perspective of a single department, but will almost invariably lead to inefficiency, frustration, waste and poor overall performance.

The catch is that the scope of a real whole-of-enterprise architecture can seem to large for anyone to comprehend. The way round this is to treat the view more like a holograph than a photograph: each view into that whole might emphasise only one specific concern or domain, yet it’s always in context of the whole. Rather than attempting the impossible task of trying to describe everything at once in excruciating detail, we instead construct a story from small pieces, loosely joined, each somewhat self-contained, yet that together imply and iterate towards this overall sense of the whole.

Which is where, and why, Kim’s style of writing about enterprise-architecture becomes so useful. This doesn’t pretend to describe yet another grand scheme about ‘the truth of enterprise-architecture’. Instead, it’s a collection of small pieces, loosely joined, each providing its own succinct view into the whole EA space, and each drawn from hard-won experience in the everyday practice of real-world enterprise-architecture.

Those heavy academic tomes and formal framework-specifications do all have their place, of course. But for most of us, to most useful writing on enterprise-architecture looks like this: small succinct reminders of principles and themes that we can put to practical use, straight away, in our everyday work.

There’s no particular structure or sequences to these pieces: that’s actually part of the point. You can read it from cover to cover, of course, but you might well gain even more value if you dip in at random instead, and allow the strange processes of serendipity to bring you straight to what you most need right now.

Whichever way you read it, this is likely to be a book you’ll come back to again and again - and help you in new and different ways every time.

Enjoy! – Tom Graves, Colchester, England, July 2013