I have two passions in my professional career.
The first is Enterprise Architecture (EA). I have been interested in this subject for the past thirty years. This passion started when I designed a system supporting the risk analysis and decision support requirements for an insurance enterprise. As I have continued my career, I realized that architecture had more to do than just with systems. It needed to understand the business and processes supported by those systems.
My other passion is Knowledge Management (KM). I became interested in this subject in the early 1990s when the ideas began to emege within the business and technology communities about the necessity to preserve the knowledge in the heads of the baby-boom generation as they began to retire. We are now about 25% of the way through that wave of retirements. How is your knowledge management program working?
Rather that being torn over which of these passions to pursue or spending only half of my time on either, I have determined that EA and KM are two sides to the same coin. It is my belief that in order for an EA program to look forward and take the enterprise into the future, it must be built upon a foundation of understanding the enterprise’s current state and how it got to be there. This requires a comprehensive knowledge management program.
I have also determine that EA and KM must be integrated. This is because EA relies on existing knowledge that has been preserved and managed in order to understand how to move forward and the act of moving forward creates new knowledge that must be preserved and managed. Unless these two activities are tightly integrated, there exists the probability that the KM knowledge base will grow further and further out of synch with the reality of the enterprise as it progresses. This then inhibits the EA function’s ability to utilize up-to-date knowledge as the enterprise makes new moves forward.
I plan to write a new set of essays about how EA and KM feed each other and how they can achieve the level of integration required to make them two sides of the same coin. Please look for them in the coming months.