BIG PICTURES AND BIG THINKING

by Ken Orr, Fellow, Cutter Business Technology Council

Every once in a while, you get a feeling that things are going in the right direction. The other day, I was working with a client and was asked to sit in on a meeting to review the architecture of a major planned project. The project team had done an excellent job in working with the client and analyzing what they were doing. It had produced some handouts and it had a PowerPoint presentation it showed on a large screen. The first presentation was okay, but it wasn't anything special. Then the fellow who was giving the presentation handed out some wall-sized (4' x 2') drawings of the basic business process that was going on in a specific organization.

Suddenly, the room came alive as the project leader took the group through the business process. People followed along and then, after a while, added their own comments and made notes on the diagrams. There was far more interaction. The project leader then posted on the wall a context diagram that showed all the external and internal entities that the organization dealt with and invited everyone to come up and look at it. And they did.

What had started out to be a pretty routine presentation turned into a dialogue. People went over the diagram, checking out the actors and messages, identifying missing or misnamed actors and messages -- in other words, the group was truly collaborating.

While the group stood around in a semi-circle to look at this drawing, I took a couple pictures with my digital camera. The manager for whom the project leader worked came over and said I didn't need to take pictures; they would send me a full-size copy of the drawing. "No," I said, "I'm interested in the people and how they're reacting to this presentation and to the artifacts."

After the session ended, I made a special point of complimenting all of the people involved and even talked with their managers. I was reminded of something somebody said at last year's Cutter Summit. At the Summit, I participated as a member of a panel that was discussing enterprise architecture. One of the panelists, Luke Hohmann, remarked that if you're going to really do enterprise architecture, you need to invest in a flatbed plotter.

A number of people in the audience took the comment as a joke, but Luke was right. Architects and engineers draw the pictures and they draw big pictures for a reason. Maps, cross sections, blueprints, and schematics often require large drawings. Very large drawings have the ability to show both the big picture if you stand back, and fine-grained detail if you move up close. Our minds, in conjunction with our eyes, have the ability to "see" different patterns depending upon how close or how far we are from a large drawing. CRTs, flatpanel displays, and projects simply don't have enough resolution to do the same thing.

Much of what goes on in enterprise architecture involves helping folks to look broader and farther. Oftentimes that requires helping them build big diagrams that people can walk around and relate to.

IT is beginning to mature. It's a very big business all over the world, and the components that we are managing get more complex and more interrelated every day. The popularity of enterprise architecture is, in part at least, a direct result of the need to understand what we have and what we're building in different, more useful ways. One of those ways, I'm convinced, involves drawing bigger pictures at all levels; at the business level, at the data level, at the application level, and surely at the technology level. So to repeat what my friend Luke said, "If you're going into enterprise architecture, you need to invest in a flatbed plotter."

-- Ken Orr, Fellow, Cutter Business Technology Council