Everything we are readying about in this class emphasizes the need to include the business in all Enterprise Architecture deliverable creation. I completely agree with this idea. If the business isn't included in the creation and use of these artifacts, they will not be useful. However, I find that the language used in Enterprise Architecture can be very difficult for a business person to understand.
For example, in Lesson 3, there was a great article by Gartner called "Advancing the Common Requirements Vision Deliverable." The article explains the need to "describes the link between environmental trends, business strategy and the overarching requirements that the EA must meet to satisfy the business strategy." The article goes into detail in how to create a common requirements vision together with the business. But in describing all of this, the article uses an astounding number of acronyms. How can anyone who doesn't use this jargon on a daily basis keep track of all of this?
I think that Enterprise Architects have to be careful to use more common language, or at least clearly identify the meaning of acronyms with a glossary in order to include the business in Enterprise Architecture efforts.
Here are some statistics on the use of acronyms from the thirteen page Gartner article (word-count used for statistics):
Only 2 of the 9 terms included the full term more than once in the article. Some of the acronyms in this article were include in the text before the term was introduced. In one case, the term Business solutions requirements (BSR) was first used as a acronym on page 3 and was only first spelled out on page 7.
Jill,
ReplyDeleteI love your comments and analysis about EA not using the same language as the rest of the business and how this can become a barrier to the CRV and communication. I experience this with clients on a weekly basis and as much as we try to use common language the consultants in my organization tend to use our own. Personally, I tell the people I work with to stop me when I fall into the habit of using language that is not easily undersandable. In the end, it takes some time but to work together well, shared terminology is essential.
So other than training folks on the business side of company basic EA principles and language what do you find helps bridge that gap? Obviously we probably can't just give them a Gartner Article!