An interesting article from Gartner announced they have identified a new approach for enterprise architecture. The first sentence that called my attention says how the research vice-president at Gartner described the key characteristic of this new approach: “architect the lines, not the boxes“.

That characteristic is in accordance with my research work on defining a new traceability methodology to bridge the gaps between business process management and the user perspective. And we do that by creating a chain of links between business processes and end users. Why is it so important to architect the lines? Once the lines are architected, you are able to control them and change them more efficiently as business possibilities evolve.

This new approach advocates for “decentralised decision-making” that recognizes a broader ecosystem, not limited to control by enterprise architects. Now, constituents within the organization demand more autonomy to be able to make decisions. This new style of enterprise architecture aims to drop boundaries to enable innovation from different sources (we could say even unexpected sources) and respond to the growing variety and complexity in markets and companies. Overall, organizations (I could say, anyone, not only enterprises) want to widen their point of view and collaborate with a larger range of people to be able to innovate.

Another interesting example reaching towards innovation is a project called IBM Extreme BlueTM that receives young talents for a summer internship in IBM’s clients. The results of this project will be showcased next month (Sep 2009).