IASA

This is an interesting book. In a curious way it is almost devoid of an underlying theory, something I've criticized many methods and books for and yet it maintains a cohesion that is difficult to fault. This book is about models, decision and analysis techniques and that makes it quite a rare and useful volume. I am frequently dismayed by the poor analytical skills of architects that I encounter day to day. This book has the analysis process and its management as its central theme and manages to do it without becoming overly academic which is a bit of a triumph.

Think EA meets operations research and you'll start to get a feel for a book dedicated to rational (no not the IBM brand) enterprise information systems management. This is EA as decision support for the CIO. It discusses strategic issues like goal setting and decision alternatives and domain definition. It then takes these goals and breaks them down into properties and provides techniques for collecting evidence; a practice that isn't as well developed as one would expect in many organizations.

The authors support this approach with a huge number of simple, but thought provoking models just the kind of thing you need to get you working on your problems. My favorite is the credibility of evidence model. There's a section on intuitive EA assessment in which they manage to give the process a lot more structure and logic than the usual rubbish that passes for intuitive analysis. And the section on organizing for EA actually has more content than is apparent on first inspection. But you'll have to work your way through the models. Based on COBIT the EA as a process approach reminds me a lot of Spewak and Hill with the same directness and perhaps a similar failing to grapple with social realities.

The book only credits two authors on the cover however I counted about a dozen contributors. The writting is clear concise if somewhat bland typical "Euro Architecture" style, but at 300 pages not too hard a read. This is not the book to base your practice on, it's not strong on governance or business integration. However, it is one of the best technique books you'll find. This is the sort of book that you'll reference more than read. Not a book for beginners or managers but obviously worth its place on your bookshelf.

Johnson, Pontus and Ekstedt Mathias (2007), Enterprise Architecture, Studentlitteratur AB, Lund,  Sweden

ISBN 978-91-44-02752-4