Customer Reviews

Enterprise Business Architecture: The Formal Link between Strategy and Results

5 star:		(2)
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In this book the authors have attempted to provide a methodology for developing an Enterprise Business Architecture (EBA). But the book falls short in its ignorance of industry standard modeling notations such as BPMN and UML--thus making the methodology difficult to apply with any of today's modeling tools--and sites very simplistic examples.

The one pearl contained in this book is the focus on business objects (informational and tangible) being exchanged between business processes as a way of understanding dependencies in the architecture.

In my opinion, the content lacks the breadth and depth I would expect to see in a book describing something as significant as a methodology for developing a Business Architecture.

I know Ralph personally and have worked with him professionally and he hit a home run with this book. It is truly business architecture laid out in detail and he shows you the information technology linkages. Written for business people who want to architect their company for success.

Mr. Whittle's book is very definitive in that it takes James Martin's concepts of Value Streams and supports it by illustrating the behaviors and the relationships within the Value Stream Context of an "end to end set of activities resulting in customer satisfaction".

When I speak at conferences on Enterprise Business Architecture, I make a point of referencing this particular book as a necessity to be on any EA/EBA professional's bookshelf. The Authors did an excellent job in providing a very pragmatic approach to enable Professional Business Driven Architects to understand much more clearly the Business Architecture environment as it fits into the overall Enterprise. Also, the Modeling Language the authors offer in the book is very comprehensive in that it illustrates Value Stream Behavior Characteristics extremely well. Over the last 5 or so years, I have given away many copies of this particular book to Conference Attendees. Likewise, when I work with clients and colleagues, I encourage the reading of this book among others to accomplish a better understanding of a "business driven" enterprise.

It is an important companion to James Martin's "The Great Transition", "Cybercorp - The New Revolution", and Michael Porter's "Competitive Advantage" as well as Mr. Porter's "Competitive Strategy". Having practiced professionally in the Enterprise Architecture disciplines for well over 2 decades, the knowledge and context communicated in this book, "Enterprise Business Architecture - The Formal Link Between Strategy and Results", also provides a very straight forward mapping to ANY framework that is truly 'business driven', and as well it enables one to easily see how the concept and context of Enterprise Business Architecture fits into more involved basic frameworks like Zachman, FEAF, et al.