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Jim,
The International Council on Systems Engineering and IEEE have
collaborated on a standard for describing architectures. This is not about
arriving at an architecture but only about the things that must be said to
communicate the essence of an architecture.
The Zachman framework (note that he does not call it an
architecture) prompts a user about some of the things that should be considered
when attempting to arrive at an enterprise architecture.
Unfortunately, it is strongly oriented to the information facet of an
enterprise. It does not preclude but does not prompt the teleonomic and
thermodynamic facets.
Ralph Hodgson, www.topquadrant.com, is working with NASA
Ames to establish an ontology for the next era of space systems. Because
it includes describing the system that gestates the space systems it comes
close to enterprise scale. It is also strongly oriented to the informatics
aspect.
Dr. Ted Blackmon, tblackmon@commonpointinc.com already
has an ontology for enterprises that create larger scale physical
systems such as oil refineries.
Note that most do not bother to precis what is meant by
architecture. According to practicing architects, architecting is the act
of discovering the arrangement of function and feature that maximizes some
objective function. Note that identifying function and feature is
secondary, in fact presumed as known. The focus and contribution of the
act is Arrangement the Maximizes.
Interestingly, those using the FEA and the C4ISR are only
fondling structure, not architecture, because they fail to first decide the
objective function without which there is no maxima.
An ontology that included Mission, Measures of Effectiveness,
Goodness of Fit and Standards of Acceptance would help recover enterprise
architecting from its current 'silver bullet' role.
Jack Ring
Co-chair
INCOSE Intelligent Enterprises Working Group
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