Those days I'm helping a bank in Thailand to start an enterprise architecture team and practice. As usual I found very technical group that was assigned to do the work. One of the first thing that I tried to do, is to explain them the different between what they have been done so far (solution architecture) and what they need to start to do from now on (enterprise architecture). In a nutshell, I keep on trying to explain that while you doing solution architecture you focused mainly on one aspect of the enterprise domains (Business, Information, Application and Technology), or small fractions of the enterprise. When doing such work you focused on low level of details, but when you're doing enterprise architecture your scope become wider and the level of detailed that you have to deal with become higher. As much as I tried to explain it they didn’t manage to get it and they staid in low level detailed technology architecture. On one of the knowledge transfer session that we had I got an idea to use the Hungarian Cube to demonstrate the difference between EA and solution architecture, and …. It simply worked!
I started the show holding the cube very close to my eyes. What I'm doing right now is technology architecture, I said. I see just one side of the cube, but I can see in detailed what exist on each surface of each rectangle of this side. That's what you are doing now, Having the cube so close to your eyes you see and capture every aspect of the cube surface (or technology architecture). Although this is an important work this is not EA.
In order to do EA we MUST take the cube away from our eyes, so we can see three sides of the cube and the relations between them. Actually we need to roll the cube to see all 4 elements of the cube. When we take the cube away from our eyes we can see the holistic view of the enterprise, which is enterprise architecture. When we take the cube away we can't see anymore all the details on the cube sides surface, therefore we can't capture low level details of the cube surfaces (or different enterprise architecture domains). As anything in life there are compromises, we can see the holistic view of the enterprise but we can’t do out work using the same level of granularity as we've done while doing technology architecture.
