Foreword
The great benefit of this novel is that it presents a practical application of industry open standards, used in combination; not in the dry factual style that you often see in such an exercise, but in a funny and engaging story with a great cast of characters.
It is 20 years ago this year that we began toying with ideas to better support Enterprise Architects in expressing their designs, allowing them to move away from unclear pictures in typical office productivity tools toward proper models that allow visualization and analysis from different angles and for many purposes. By 2002, these ideas had become formalized into the ArchiMate® R&D project that I managed at the Telamatica Instituut in the Netherlands. These efforts evolved and ultimately produced The Open Group ArchiMate Standard. In this novel, the ArchiMate Standard is used in conjunction with many other standards from The Open Group, including the TOGAF®, IT4IT™, DPBOK™, and O–AA™ Standards.
The Turning Point builds upon one of the core demonstration cases from the ArchiMate world – the fictitious but realistic insurance company, ArchiSurance. This case study has been extended over the years and in this novel you will read how ArchiSurance is now using Agile Architecture practices in support of its “Digital Customer Intimacy” strategy, which is going to take the company to a new, fully digitized operating model. You will follow the daily life of Kathleen Stone, Chief Architect of ArchiSurance, and her colleagues, and see how they deal with all kinds of challenges, ranging from governance in an Agile context to cybersecurity issues, and from funding discussions to managing technological complexity.
I hope you will enjoy this novel as much as I did. I think it is a great introduction to architecture practice and the valuable role that standards can play in it. It will appeal to both novices in the field and to experienced architects who want to know more about the benefits of these standards, and how they can be used together to great effect.
Marc Lankhorst
Managing Consultant & Chief Technology Evangelist, BiZZdesign
Enschede, The Netherlands
June 2021