It is amusing that the first part of this book to be read is the last part to be written. It provides, however, an opportunity to share with you a little about how writing and editing this book has changed my thinking not just about enterprise architecture (EA), or about the role of information technology (IT) and IT professionals in organizations, or even about enterprises themselves; although, certainly, all those evolved too during this journey of discovery.

Writing about an emerging discipline like EA is kind of like writing about the life history of a person when he or she is only ten years old — so much hope and promise, but not much time yet for actualization. Perhaps that is a bit of hyperbole since it has been over 20 years since the first article was published proposing how the principles of architecture and engineering could and should be applied to managing organizations and their ITs. That’s equivalent to about 1945 in the history of the quality movement, or about 40 years before “Quality is Job 1” became the advertising slogan for a major U.S. auto manufacturer. Or maybe 1800 in the history of the Industrial Age, when there were about 500 steam engines, pretty much all residing in England, and none of them working all that well.

Still, EA practices and tools progressed appreciably these past 20 years and we see significant advantages and improvements in those organizations investing their time, monies, and talents in EA-related activities. Yet these are the exceptions and largely invisible to the managers of most organizations, much like the IT-enabled strategic advantages that transformed companies and industries were invisible to most as they began to emerge in the late 1960s. So while working on this book, my appreciation grew for the intellectual revolutions that accompany technological ones, as did my patience, for it is one thing to invent or acquire a game-changing idea or technology, but quite another to discover the ways to use it well.