The Art of Enterprise Information Architecture Book Review

This book is a mature book on Enterprise Information Architecture. By mature I mean thorough and packed with wisdom gained through experience. I am a member of the Microsoft camp. I have been for a long time now, and I have no intention of switching to IBM, but I wish Microsoft would be producing books like this that included their technology. Microsoft may able to in a few years, but they are no where close to being this mature with their Enterprise Architecture tools now. The Microsoft MDM tools are showing signs of improvement with Denali, but they still have a way to go before the product is a competitor to the IBM MDM stack. This is one of the best real world Enterprise Information Architecture books I have read. It starts off with a few chapters that go into great detail introducing and defining Enterprise Information Architecture. It then has individual chapters that detail the individual topics. They include A Conceptual and Logical View, Component Model, Operational Model, New Delivery Models: Cloud Computing, Enterprise Information Integration, Intelligent Utility Networks, Enterprise Metadata Management , Master Data Management , Web 2.0 World, Dynamic Warehousing, and New Trends in Business Analytics and Optimization. This book does an excellent job of making the case for architecture in the enterprise. The concept of architecture is hard enough to sell on individual software development projects, but on an enterprise level it is usually treated as a four letter word and the word is not "good". So many places today have what they call an Enterprise Architecture group, but rarely do they do anything that has to do with Enterprise Architecture. If you curious as to what they should be doing, read this book. The book references maturity models frequently. They are great for gauging where your company is on the maturity level. The book also does a great job of introducing the different data domains found in a decent size enterprise. They include Metadata, Master Data, Operational Data, Unstructured Data, and Analytical data. Having these defined by context and role allows you to implement an IT Governance framework to manage them. The book is written in an easy to read format and is broken down in a very logic way making it also easy to target specific topics. No matter what your technology stack is this book can help you implement an Enterprise Information Architecture or at least it will help you improve the one you have in place now.

The Art of Enterprise Information Architecture: A Systems-Based Approach for Unlocking Business Insight