Give Focus and Context using an exploded view for principles: WHAT, WHY, and... HOW
Last Thursday, I had the most wonderful audience for my presentation at the EA Conference of IRM UK in London.
All of the 60+ participants had an open mind, listening to my visual story about how to let the CIO make decisions using architecture visualizations.
It appears that architects hardly collaborate with the CIO, and worse, the CIO makes architectural decisions using other people's input rather than their architects. With this situation at hand, the architect must do something: Present himself with a visual architecture that his CIO can not refuse for decision-making.
But is every architect able to do this: Create usable visualizations for the CIO?
I say yes. Using a new paradigm for enterprise architecture to make it easier: the Dragon1 open EA method.
Something Old, Something New...
In Dragon1, we focus on conceptual design as architecture is a total concept, and an architect is a creative designer. With this foundation, the road is cleared to focus on decision-making, choosing the proper business or IT concepts given certain ambitions and goals and given the current (unfit) situation.
Not all principles I presented were completely new to the viewers. But everyone appreciated it, so I focused on some techniques again. For instance, to focus on the viewing area in a visualization, as you see in this slide with WHY, WHAT, and HOW
13 Architecture Visualization Principles
In the presentation, available for download here, I showed how, with techniques like simplicity, focus, context, exploded views, sketching, and reporting, an architect can make a CIO make decisions using architecture visualizations.
I am very much interested in your experience as an architect applying these visualization techniques from the open Dragon1 EA Method. Anytime you can send me suggestions or your experience.