"Enterprise patterns are now an established approach that can be used to describe and explain architectural change at all levels -- from IT transformation to product lifecycle management, from business capability architecture to real-time enterprise frameworks."

Opening Statement

Change at an architectural level is always transformational. But too often architects have struggled to demonstrate or realize this potential for making a significant, positive difference at the enterprise level. Instead, big changes are more frequently driven by the architectural opportunities that arise from new technologies.

This is starting to change, and leading enterprises are planning architectural change that genuinely combines the organizational, business, and technology perspectives. Enterprise transformation that successfully unites all three viewpoints requires a new technique to raise the architectural debate to the level of senior decision makers. This issue of Cutter IT Journal provides practical insight and guidance on how enterprise patterns are being used to drive transformational change.

IN THIS ISSUE

Jaye Hicks and J. David Gibson start the discussion by reminding us of the work of Christopher Alexander, and in particular his belief that our innate human capacity for design can be described using a pattern language. Enterprise patterns can be used at many levels within an enterprise, and their focus here is on IT transformations. In describing their experiences, they make a useful distinction between macro and micro enterprise patterns, where micro is a slice of code, while macro could be a high-level reference architecture.

In a recent Cutter Executive Report, I observe that "most architectural patterns today are very detailed and often very technical. In contrast, an enterprise pattern describes a higher-level generalization of a number of more detailed patterns drawn from domain or segment architectures."¹ While early references to enterprise patterns focus more on application and integration patterns, Hicks and Gibson discuss what they call the "enterprise pattern context," describing items that impact IT at the time an enterprise pattern is applied. This shows how enterprise patterns are moving from an exclusive focus on IT to one that includes the full enterprise. They also describe a set of "warping behaviors," such as following a pattern to the letter or managing to the exception rather than the norm, which can hinder the effective use of enterprise patterns.

Next, Indranil Bhattacharya and Michael Hartges take the use of enterprise patterns into the business world. They focus on patterns "to represent the knowledge required for product lifecycle management across a large enterprise," providing "a pattern language for product lifecycle management primarily based on emergent, good, and best practices within large telecom operators." Telecoms, they say, are facing the need to transform from products based around voice, data, and messaging to ones "merged with new services that revolve around the connected work and life of users."

By applying the "embodied making" method, they have developed 32 individual patterns in their pattern language, with lovely, memorable names such as Deep Roots and Few Skilled Gardeners. They show how these various patterns combine to provide a thorough and deep understanding of the way product lifecycles are governed. In conclusion, they point out that development of a pattern language is a continuous process that can "influence daily practice in every level of an organization" -- a conclusion that is common in companies that have used enterprise patterns. They also mention the notion of architecture styles, which leads us to our next article.

In "Architecture Styles: An Enterprise Approach to Strategic Decision Making," David Turner and Laurence Norman introduce us to an excellent tool to help large organizations adopt pattern languages. Using a strong metaphorical theme, architecture styles bundle related enterprise patterns in a way that effectively helps to abstract complexity, communicate intentions, convey tradeoffs, and drive alignment with corporate strategy.

Having found that "complex models with multiple weighting factors, priority grids, and status flags ... frequently cause more confusion than clarity," the authors decided to use three perspectives -- business, organizational, and technology (represented by the business demand model, the business operating model, and the supply value model, respectively) -- and then combine them to define an architecture style. As we saw in the previous article, each architecture style is given a compelling and meaningful name, such as Cathedral or Market Stall.

Turner and Norman observe that any decision is a consideration of tradeoffs, and an architecture style's chief benefit is its ability to communicate such tradeoffs. They argue that styles must be created in response to a specific situation and can be extended and improved with increasing benefits. Once established, architecture styles are an important mechanism for carrying on a dialogue with senior business stakeholders.

Our next author, Andrew Guitarte, also extends the use of enterprise patterns. In his article, Guitarte describes business capability architecture as an effective enterprise pattern to ensure coalignment for every enterprise change -- in effect, it becomes almost a meta-enterprise pattern! He explains how business architecture's unique value proposition is "to increase functional effectiveness by mapping and modeling the business to the organization's vision and strategic goals." Interestingly, he makes the point that "capability" is not included in most of the well-known architecture frameworks, such as TOGAF or Zachman. Yet when an organization uses business capabilities as the fundamental or meta-enterprise pattern, it helps manage the unpredictable change that will inevitably affect any enterprise.

Finally, Jagdish Bhandarkar and his coauthors describe a "real-time enterprise (RTE) framework" that suggests one possible future direction for enterprise patterns. In a complex, uncertain environment, organizations face difficult decisions every day. The authors propose a reasoning framework that "poses these questions, answers them, and helps realize those answers with regard to the organizational assets."

The notion of sense-and-respond has informed enterprise architecture since the late 1980s, when it was pioneered by companies such as Westpac.² Bhandarkar and his colleagues explicitly add "analyze" to the sense-and-respond model, showing how contemporary IT helps implement the concept. The resulting RTE framework is their proposal for a sense-analyze-respond framework. According to the authors, "The analyze component helps identify the patterns, trends, and correlations across the various external and internal inputs. It enables the enterprise to forecast various potential scenarios, identifying the probabilities and consequences with what-if analyses." This brings our issue of Cutter IT Journal around full circle. Enterprise patterns are the glue that links sense with respond, using the analysis tools that these authors describe.

KEY POINTS

Enterprise patterns have come a long way since they were first introduced 20 years ago.³ Although envisaged from the outset as "a higher-level generalization of a number of more detailed patterns drawn from domain or segment architectures,"⁴ initial enterprise patterns often had their origins within IT. As we have seen in this issue, enterprise patterns are now an established approach that can be used to describe and explain architectural change at all levels -- from IT transformation to product lifecycle management, from business capability architecture to real-time enterprise frameworks.

Based on Alexander's idea of a pattern language, enterprise patterns are no longer simply a mechanism for defining, debating, and managing enterprise transformation. Enterprise patterns now form the building blocks to create a sophisticated enterprise pattern language of architecture styles.

The examples and case studies described in this issue provide practical observations that will help any architect use enterprise patterns more effectively; for instance:

• Enterprise patterns are an effective tool to achieve significant organizational change. Although the examples in this issue show that they work well for a segment of the overall enterprise architecture -- whether that segment is for IT transformation or business product lifecycles -- they also demonstrate how enterprise patterns work in their broad sense for driving transformational change at the enterprise level.

  Takeaway: If you are not already using enterprise patterns, they are well worth considering. If you are using enterprise patterns in one segment type, consider spreading their use to other areas.

• Business capabilities (or their equivalent) have been used by business architects for nearly 20 years. Guitarte suggests the idea of a business capability architecture as a meta-enterprise pattern.

  Takeaway: If you are already using business capabilities, define an enterprise pattern to show how they bind architectural components in your organization. Explore this enterprise pattern to see how it could be extended or improved. If you are not using business capabilities, define the opposite enterprise pattern to understand the benefits or disadvantages of not using a capability-based strategy approach.

• In many organizations, enterprise patterns have become the center point for strategic debate, but to some extent they remain passive in the sense that the analysis takes place separately from the operations of the enterprise. The notion of a real-time enterprise framework suggests a more active role, with enterprise patterns being the foundation for the analysis that sits between sense and respond.

  Takeaway: If you are already using enterprise patterns, explore how aspects of the process could be directly supported by technology. Better yet, are there any ways in which the enterprise pattern can be embedded into enterprise operations through the support of emerging technologies? If you are not yet using enterprise patterns, consider the opportunities they may offer your organization.

• Architecture styles are an exciting new way of grouping enterprise patterns into a coherent pattern language. Giving a related set of patterns a strong metaphorical basis makes each pattern more memorable and meaningful -- which helps to focus debate on the key architectural issues.

  Takeaway: If you are already using enterprise patterns, consider renaming and regrouping them around a powerful figurative or allegorical theme that will emphasize the underlying change that is required. If you are not yet using enterprise patterns, identify your metaphorical theme as early as possible. This will help you define your enterprise patterns, give them consistency and coherency, and make it easier to get your ideas across to others.

As I stated at the beginning of this introduction, leading enterprises are driving transformational change that combines organizational, business, and technology perspectives. Comprehending such a broad enterprise-wide vision requires an holistic understanding and examination of the enterprise. It is the unique contribution of enterprise architecture to provide the discipline and techniques to envisage these transformational, architectural shifts.

Enterprise patterns elevate the architectural debate to the level of senior decision makers by:

• Providing a means for aggregating viewpoints and lower-level patterns into an holistic visualization of architectural possibilities

• Focusing debate at the architectural and enterprise level by summarizing and synthesizing a mass of detail into a small number of succinct enterprise patterns

• Highlighting relevant information for key decision makers in a consistent, concise, and comprehensive summary

• Grounding discussion around solid choices and measurable outcomes by adding metrics to show the value, costs, risks, and options enabled or constrained by an enterprise pattern

I hope you have enjoyed reading about these innovations in the use of enterprise patterns. Please contact me (revernden@cutter.com) to provide feedback or to discuss topics in this issue of Cutter IT Journal.

ENDNOTES

¹ Evernden, Roger. "Enterprise Patterns: The Key to Effective EA Application as Transformation." Cutter Consortium Business & Enterprise Architecture Executive Report, Vol. 14, No. 8, 2011.

² Haeckel, Stephan H. Adaptive Enterprise: Creating and Leading Sense-and-Respond Organizations. Harvard Business Review Press, 1999.

³ The concept of enterprise patterns as an enterprise architecture technique was first described in my presentation "From Stumbling Blocks to Building Blocks" at the Information FrameWork (IFW) Conference held in Monte Carlo, 1995.

⁴ Evernden. See 1.

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