I completely agree with Neil Ward-Dutton when he argues that Businesses aren't machines, and enterprise architecture can't make them so. There is a fantasy that Enterprise Architects are architecting the enterprise, when they are at best architecting systems of systems to support the enterprise.

The people who are really making structural decisions about the business organization itself are not called enterprise architects, they are called CEOs or COOs or something like that. And you can bet they aren't playing Zachman bingo.

Neil and I agree about a lot of things, but one of the things we disagree about is the word "alignment". (See previous debate on Business-IT Alignment). I think this word completely misrepresents the relationship between IT and business, and I think Neil's argument here just reinforces my opinion on this.

But the image of a business as a machine is a powerful one, not restricted to enterprise architects. Gareth Morgan devotes the second chapter of his modern classic Images of Organization to this metaphor, and to showing the limitations of this bureaucratic view. (Essential reading for enterprise architects.)

I actually think this may be the direction that many companies go: grant employees the ability to use them, without necessarily offering to pay for them.

A new version of MODAF has just appeared, which puts MODAF firmly ahead of other enterprise architecture frameworks in terms of its support for SOA.

MODAF is the enterprise architecture framework produced by the UK ministry of defence. Version 1.1, which appeared last year, contained a Strategic View, described in terms of Capabilities and Capability Dependencies. Version 1.2 now contains a Service (or "Service-Orientated") View, driven by the Strategic (Capability) View, and sitting above the Systems View.

http://www.modaf.org.uk/

This clearly goes further than the latest version of DoDAF (a roughly similar framework produced by the US Department of Defense), which has a single view for Systems and Services, and no Strategic View.

Meanwhile TOGAF remains stuck in a time-warp. In December 2003, when I wrote an article on Enterprise Architecture for the CBDI Journal, I was told that TOGAF 9, which would have some support for SOA, was "coming soon". Nearly five years later and it is still "coming soon". Soumen Chatterjee expects that "too many players" will produce a "mixed-up world".

There are a few bloggers talking about possible SOA support within TOGAF, including Raj Ajora and Awel Dico, and some good ideas coming out of the SOA Working Group within the Open Group. But they've got some catching up to do.