Not too long ago a colleague recommended me a book authored by Roger Evernden titled “101 Lessons from Enterprise Architecture”.

(Evernden, 2015) Starts his introduction “Several years ago I came across a book by Matthew Frederick – “101 Things I Learned in Architecture School”. I started thinking about things that I had learned from Enterprise Architecture, and that’s how this book started. It doesn’t cover everything that I’ve learned from enterprise architecture, but it does cover some of the things that matter, a few that get overlooked, and some that were a challenge to write explain in a couple of paragraphs and a diagram”.

I am finishing my EA 872 Spring semester class at Penn State University and I started to think on all the lessons learned through this cycle.

• Working with Toolkits: to understand Enterprise Architecture complex issues which usually are having a variety of solutions, toolkits demonstrated to be extremely helpful. They are versatile, and adaptable resources.
• Expressing ideas in writing: anticipating the reader needs reflecting intellectual flexibility and maturity and evaluating the adequacy of the EA arguments and ideas.
• Hands on experiences: working on real EA artifacts, creating, adapting, and evaluating them; helped to understand the concepts of EA.
• Foundation for Execution: “a foundation for execution is the IT infrastructure and digitized business processes automating a company’s core capabilities” (Ross, Weill, & Robertson, 2006).

The list presented, of course is not exhaustive, it is the tip of an iceberg of learning experiences for which I am very grateful.

References

Evernden, R. (2015). 101 Lessons from Enterprise Architecture. Kindle Edition.

Ross, J. W., Weill, P., & Robertson, D. S. (2006). Enterprise Architecture as Strategy. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.