TED talks

Something a bit off-topic this time. Do you know TED talks? TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It is a small non-profit organisation that started in 1984 organising yearly conferences around the globe.

On their website TED.com, they publish videos of the best talks and performances from TED and partners for free. More than 450 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week. The videos can be viewed on the website, but also downloaded as podcast.

Since more than a year I download the videos on my iPod and view them when I have some time to spare. Most talks are about 15 minutes in length. The talks are always inspiring, brought by inspiring people, mostly unknown, but occasionally well known people like Bill Gates, Al Gore and Bill Clinton perform as well.

Highly recommended, not only for your own education and awareness, but also to learn how to give a good talk to an audience! Some of the most inspiring videos are this and definately this. Just to get you started...

Measuring Enterprise Architecture Maturity

Capability Maturity Models (CMMs) are used to measure the maturity of organisations in various ways.    

There are CMMs for software engineering, system engineering, project management, software maintenance, risk management, system acquisition, information technology (IT), services, business processes generally, and human capital management. Because several CMMs are used in an organisation a more overall CMM was created, called Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), providing a general maturity level to an organisation. The terms CMM and CMMI are developed by the Carnegie Mellon University. CMMs usually have 5 levels:

1. Initial
2. Repeatable
3. Defined
4. Managed
5. Optimized

When looking for a maturity model for enterprise architecture, I found several architectural CMMs:

• US DoC ACMM
• US GAO EAMMF
• E2AMM

All of these provide a matrix that describes levels of maturity and the topics to measure the maturity. I found the E2AMM matrix the most useful. Using the matrix provided architects can value their maturity and find what measures must be taken to improve the maturity of their enterprise architecture organisation.

It is not uncommon to have various levels of maturity on the topics when the matrix is filled in. A consistent maturity level over all topics in the future is not needed as well. Enterprises can decide to value some topics as more important than others. They can for example decide to have a generic maturity level of 3 for all topics, but maturity level 4 for some that are found most important.

It would be an interesting exersise to fill-in the E2AMM maturity matrix (or one of the other ones if you like) for your own organisation, just to see where you are and what could be enhanced.