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Roger Sessions

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Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises 1st Edition

by Roger Sessions (Author)

4.0 23 ratings

Part of: Developer Best Practices (23 books)

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Dismantle the overwhelming complexity in your IT projects with strategies and real-world examples from a leading expert on enterprise architecture. This guide describes best practices for creating an efficient IT organization that consistently delivers on time, on budget, and in line with business needs.

IT systems have become too complex—and too expensive. Complexity can create delays, cost overruns, and outcomes that do not meet business requirements. The resulting losses can impact your entire company. This guide demonstrates that, contrary to popular belief, complex problems demand simple solutions. The author believes that 50 percent of the complexity of a typical IT project can and should be eliminated—and he shows you how to do it.

You’ll learn a model for understanding complexity, the three tenets of complexity control, and how to apply specific techniques such as checking architectures for validity. Find out how the author’s methodology could have saved a real-world IT project that went off track, and ways to implement his solutions in a variety of situations.

About the Author

Roger Sessions is a recognized expert in enterprise architecture. He serves on the Board of Directors of the International Association of Software Architects (IASA), is Editor-in-Chief of IASA's Perspectives Journal, and is a Microsoft MVP in enterprise architecture. He has written six books, including Software Fortresses: Modeling Enterprise Architectures, and many articles. He has been a keynote speaker on the topic of enterprise architecture for dozens of events in more than 30 countries. He is the Chief Technology Officer of ObjectWatch.

ISBN-10

0735625786
ISBN-13

978-0735625785
Edition

1st
Publisher

Microsoft Press
Publication date

May 7, 2008
Part of series

Developer Best Practices
Language

English
Dimensions

7.38 x 0.63 x 9 inches
Print length

256 pages
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Microsoft Press; 1st edition (May 7, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0735625786
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0735625785
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.1 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.38 x 0.63 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,798,812 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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4.0 23 ratings

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Pierre

Easy read

Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2010

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Sessions correctly identifies the real enemy of IT; complexity. Exploring the facets of simplicity and its applicability to Enterprise Architecture makes this book well worth reading. If the author repeats himself, it's only to bash this important concept into our thick skulls. Let we never forget! I wish more books explored this topic.

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Erik Gfesser

Straight talk on enterprise architecture

Reviewed in the United States on August 17, 2008

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Effective architecture books are difficult to find. The subject is not trivial. And disagreements are prevalent in this space, even on the definition of architecture itself. It seems that more texts on architecture are being written than in the past, but most of the emphasis seems to be on design. While design is important, architectural decisions have far reaching effects on software systems (such as maintainability and scalability) if and when they are ever actually successfully constructed and deployed. Of course, most technology professionals rightly recognize that there exist different types of architecture. Roger Sessions defines enterprise architecture as "a description of the goals of an organization, how these goals are realized by business processes, and how these business processes can be better served through technology". Sessions later offers a simplified definition that it is "the art of maximizing the value of IT investments", and reducing complexity in the enterprise helps achieve these investment returns. To explain how this might be accomplished, the author discusses mathematical concepts, enterprise architecture concepts, and Simple Iterative Partitions (SIP) concepts. Part I of this book discusses the current state of enterprise architecture and presents a look at complexity and the mathematics of complexity. Part II discusses ABCs (Autonomous Business Capabilities) and the SIP process that the author created. While the chapters on complexity start out strong, these tend to get a bit tiresome due to the lengthy explanations of basic mathematical concepts centered around partitions (although the chapter entitled "Enterprise Architecture Today" in which the author discusses the current space alongside succinct presentations of the Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architectures, the Open Group Architecture Framework, and the Federal Enterprise Architecture is very well written). The second part of the book starts a bit slow as well, but chapters 5, 6, and 8 are strong, and if one does not have time to read the rest of the book it is recommended that focus is placed on these chapters. While brief, the pages on project prioritization are especially worth consideration by the reader. Eight default factors are included in the author's typical Value Graph Analysis when determining project prioritization: market drivers, cost, organizational risk, technical risk, financial value, organizational preparedness, team readiness, and status quo. The radar graphs are used in a similar manner to those used in "Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed" (see my review). It is very unfortunate that while the author provides input to the market driver factor, input to the other factors is not divulged. Although this prioritization is not an exact science, the inclusion of this information by the author would have been helpful to make sure the reader is on the same page of understanding. The case study presented in chapter 6 is interesting. While a lot of such material is freely available on the internet, in my opinion more book authors need to start including similar substantive real-world content. The National Program for Information Technology (NPfIT) is the case study. The basic goal of NPfIT is to automate and centralize the massive record keeping that is the backbone of its national health care system run by the British government's National Health Service (NHS). The author discusses how his SIP process could have avoided much of the complexity to the project (that has resulted in failure) by vendors such as Accenture and Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). Sessions includes some well-worded closing thoughts in chapter 8: "We frequently hear that IT systems are getting more complex, as if this is a natural consequence of living in the 21st century. In reality, however, it is not systems that are getting more complex but system requirements that are getting more complex. It is not the job of the enterprise architect to design ever more complex systems. It is the job of the enterprise architect to resist the temptation to build complex systems." Also: "The paradox about complexity is that it is simple to make systems complex; it is complex to make systems simple. Many people think that it takes a lot of talent to create a highly complicated architecture. That isn't true. It takes a lot of talent to take complicated ideas and realize them in a simple architecture. Anybody can create a complex architecture. It takes no skill at all. Architectures naturally seek the maximum possible level of complexity all on their own. If it is a complex architecture you are after, you don't even need architects. You might as well just fire them all and let the developers work on their own."

5 people found this helpful

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smartzebra

As expected.

Reviewed in the United States on December 28, 2012

Verified Purchase

For the price I paid, I got my moneys worth as I also scored an A in the subject. Really helpful book with a lot of examples.

Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2009

Maybe I'm missing something, but this book seems flawed. I agree that simple is always better. I also agree that breaking complex problems into smaller pieces (partitions) is a good way to make something more manageable and increase your chances of success. But....

The idea that breaking things into partitions that are isolated seems flawed. Consider this example in the book - you have a bunch of executives trying to figure out lunch. Rather than having the group try to decide, you break them into five different sets of execs. Each determines part of the meal, such as appetizer, main item, or dessert.
Each group can figure out there piece because there are fewer factors involved, so you'll get lunch resolved and decided exponentially quicker.

Okay, but...

Most pieces of a larger project don't happen in isolation. As such, it isn't as simple as this tries to make it. If you end up with a group of executives eating a meal that is mish mashed together, then you are likely to have a bad lunch. While a bad lunch is tolerable, a bad project is not.

An equally flawed example is that of using an emergency response system. The author comments that it would be bad for a surgeon to give directions on removing a victim from a car. That is a bad example, but indicates the slight way this book seems 'off'. Instead of that example, the author should have commented that if a surgeon tries to operate before the victim is removed from the car....

There are a lot of interesting tidbits in this book, but as some of the other reviews said, there is a lot of redundancy, a lot of vague comments, and a lot of common sense too. The math is interesting, but not enough to make this a great book.

5 people found this helpful

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AdrianD

Very good overall experience.

Reviewed in Canada on September 8, 2014

Verified Purchase

Very good overall experience; highly recommended seller.

Foufai

Livre intéressant !

Reviewed in France on March 4, 2013

Verified Purchase

Un livre qui traite de la complexité du SI et de l'architecture comme moyen de maîtrise de cette complexité.
Son auteur présente une méthodologie intéressante (nommée SIP) pour mesurer la complexité structurelle du SI.

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Incognito

Unorthodox EA

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 14, 2011

Verified Purchase

It is quite common these days to hear someone saying that enterprise architecture has failed to provide expected value. Some people declare that EA is dead. Not that anyone agrees with that, but you can't deny that certain degree of disillusionment does take place. Practitioners are increasingly disappointed with apparent lack of focus of `classic' all-your-system-are-belong-to-us EA frameworks (read TOGAF) and desperately trying to find a leaner, more value-driven way of doing things.

This book is essentially about post-framework EA. It isn't new, in fact it was published 3 years ago, but, like a good wine that gets better with age, the book becomes more and more relevant with each passing year. Roger Session courageously redefines what good enterprise architecture is about. In his view, there's a single fundamental root of every notorious issue in modern enterprise IT such as business misalignment, untimely and unreliable information, soaring costs. The root is complexity that poisons everything if not properly controlled. The goal of this book is to present a proper set of thinking tools that enable an architect to understand, measure, plan and contain the overwhelming complexity of an enterprise.

First few chapters are dedicated a theoretic introduction to the subject of complexity. Author draws from combinatorics and set theory to illustrate several techniques to battle complexity: partitioning, simplification, and iteration. The less math-savvy you are as a reader, the more challenging the reading would be, but at the same time the more you get from the book. Anyway it's not a rocket science, so everyone could make sense of it.

The rest of the book is mostly dedicated to author's own lightweight method on controlling the complexity of enterprise architectures which is called Simple Iterative Partitions (SIP). From its point of view an enterprise is seen as a hierarchical composition of autonomous business capabilities (ABCs) that partition both modules of business and software systems that support them. A nice feature of SIP is that it draws a clear line between enterprise and solutions architecture and doesn't attempt to get into the domain of latter, but rather helps to define boundaries of systems that need to be developed or acquired.

In addition to that there's an entertaining case study of complexity (mis-)management given on an example of notorious multi-billion atrocity of NPfIT programme that is run by British National Healthcare System since early 2000s. A superficial application of SIP demonstrates that certain programme-level decisions made in the past were fundamentally wrong from the complexity control perspective, and a better way of achieving the goal is elicited. Of course devil is in the detail so I wouldn't take the conclusions deadly seriously; however, for a sake of method demonstration it is really valuable perspective.

I found the book to be easy to read. In fact it is quite short, less than 200 pages of actual content that is concisely summarized in the last chapter for further reference. It could be even shorter if author took out lengthy introduction on the subject of EA in the first chapter. It is completely useless to most readers because it presents yet another overview of Zachman Framework and TOGAF that is too short to be practically useful on its own and doesn't add any value as it is not referenced in the book later.

In summary, I would suggest reading this book to anyone practising EA as it provides a completely unorthodox perspective, which is always good since it feeds your critical thinking. On the other hand if your professional interests are closer to tin, e.g. technical architecture, you may find this book of less interest as it lacks any specifics or technologies. It isn't a book that you'll keep at your desk, but it is definitely a smart and enjoyable reading that changes the way you look at everyday things.

(This review was originally posted on Enterprise Systems Engineering blog -- see profile for URL)

3 people found this helpful

Tony Jones

Recommended for the Architecture dilettante if not beyond

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 1, 2011

Verified Purchase

I come across architecture a lot through work and wanted an intelligent book about the topic rather than an idiots guide (e.g. to Zachman or TOGAF). This book pays off superbly (I got it at under £15); the first few chapters are slightly too lightweight and inevitably American in context, however the book quickly moves onto a thorough treatment of complexity and what to do about it then goes to a UK example of an over complex project walking through both a strategic architectural flaw and a major architectural risk with one of the applications.

As a whole this short book is a good read and is one I will re-read once I have absorbed its concepts. I also suspect that is a parallel version of this for the world of high-level project planning

3 people found this helpful

colin johnson

Not Enterprise Architecture and not very useful for IT architecture either

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 30, 2012

Verified Purchase

Bought this book as I read the verty favourable reviews. I have been working as an Enterprise / Tehnical / Software Architecture for over 6 years but thought it was worth increasing my knowledge.

I was very disappointed with this book which could be easily condensed to a page or even the line "simpler architectures are easier to develop and maintain". Wow, what an insight! The author attempts to hype this rather obvious premise using mathematics and some dubious "propriety" processes he invented called "SIPs" and "ABC".

Not a practical guide to developing, managing or governing EA or any type of architectures. Not much academic value either. Any architeture attempting to "sell" a solution using concepts in the book would get laughed out of any boardroom!

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