Saw a post this morning (via James McGovern) entitled ”Hello World! Untie the Gardener” by a blogger named ingine. It’s a brief and basic call to action for more people to step out and get more ideas and dialogue around EA going. I concur with this call and am seconding it (or thirding or thirtying it). My primary motive for this blog is to get the ideas that float around our teams and our organization out into the world and grind them out. The result will nearly always be a better set than when I started. Most recently for me, the topics and discussion around Declarative EA and Buy vs. Build have only refined and improved my ideas. So hear hear! Let’s get more of this going.

When James provided his link to this post, he asked ingine to “…start the conversation by asking specific questions.” I’m sure ingine has questions or topics of his own, but I’d be happy to throw out some my random ideas and questions and see if we can grease the skids a bit:

1) What are some proven methods around iterative EA? We’ve all heard the chant of “Future State-Current State-Gap Analysis-Migration Plan” enough to have it embedded in our souls, but how do we leverage these good ideas in a way that doesn’t relegate EA to functioning as a team of Binder Boys?

2) Folks like Simon Guest with Microsoft (and many others), have started to collaborate with the User Experience community (The likes of Lou Rosenfeld, Peter Moreville, Jesse James Garret) for more interplay between Architecture and UX. Is this part of a bigger trend of moving away from EA as process and into EA “for the people?” I, for one, would love to see that happen, but what does that mean for the process- and framework-heavy aspects of traditional EA (I’m looking at you mister Zachman)?

3) How does well-run EA best serve an organization first instead of worrying about controlling its decisions? On that note, how does well-run EA best serve its stakeholders first?

4) Is Microsoft on to something with this OBA thing? For that matter, are we really there with Composite Applications? Personally, I see this very idea as an evolution of Enterprise Architectures which serve the user by creating naturally productive applications, but what do others think?

5) How can an organization already in bed with a major software vendor more towards welcoming open source where it makes sense? What experiences have others had in this realm?

6) Is ECM mature enough to be of strategic value to most organizations, or does the visible lack of standards and market volatility mean that we aren’t there yet?

7) Is it okay to have a list of random EA questions and not ask any about SOA?… crap. 

I’ll stop there for now, though more are bouncing around. Some of these are already in my blogging queue, but I’d love to hear from others on any and all of these. Let’s get some dialogue going…