Enterprise Architecture As Strategy - book

Heading into this book, my hopes were high. Particularly encouraging were the opening definitions of enterprise architecture and it's positioning as a business rather than IT issue. This makes increasing sense in today's world and fits with what I perceive as an increasing tendency to clearly separate business focused 'value add' IT from 'business as usual' or 'maintenance'.

Perhaps I've over indulged recently on Enterprise 2.0 texts; the first 100 pages feel predictable and pedestrian. There are some fine principles in there but they're expressed without objectivity; for instance, is it likely a CIO would pour scorn on a multi-million dollar enterprise resource planning (ERP) software implementation delivered under his leadership? Or give a negative assessment on his involvement in IT strategy? Hence, when the CIO waxes lyrical about his own capabilities you've got to take it all with a pinch of salt. It would have been more revealing to focus on CIOs giving mixed messages, or perhaps the experience of the customer and internal end users.

The first 100 pages fails in it's aim to be a handbook & guide; it needs to prove traction below the CxO level to do this. Indeed, it's hard to pick out the real lessons because it's hard to spot a pattern between strategies; perhaps the authors are trying too hard not to be prescriptive, but the end result is somewhat inane. For example, by the time in your career that you want to buy and read a book like this it's kind of obvious you need your IT function to be responsive to the needs of the business.

Published in 2006, much is made of the success of those companies who have pursued an enterprise architecture as strategy approach without really saying how they did it in any detail. Cemex is called out as an example of great growth due to this approach, yet the book notes that it grew by acquisition and the much referred to 'agility' seems to have made the company insufficiently agile to avoid the stock price thumping seen by many other companies in that sector since 2008's crash.

At various points you might get the impression that a whacking great ERP implementation would deliver lots of benefits, such as technology and business process standardisation, yet would allow your organisation to remain agile; the IT equivalent of having your cake and eating it. Indeed, throughout the book, you get the impression that this is a very ERP friendly approach. Considering it's 2006 publish date, failing to address the various innovative approaches of the time is, well, shortsighted at best.

The book reads like a research text written by academics; the kind of thing beloved of MBA courses everywhere.

Past page 100, it gets better as it starts to talk in some detail about lessons from real life. There are some great