The MWT/TEBT Collaboration Architecture recognises that when technologies successfully transform businesses they often do so through sharing and/or standardisation of business processes and data. It is this standardisation which allows greater transparency of operations (and operational risk) as well as ultimately enabling the implementation of the market-based approach at the heart of the MWT Model.
However, when it comes to defining and selecting which technology-enabled business transformation (TEBT) initiatives to perform, there is an overlap between the MWT Model and the most useful parts of what is called Enterprise Architecture.
Where enterprise architecture relates is in developing the collaboration architecture (to use the MWT term) to enable the senior executive team to have discussions on organisational value – and ultimately what processes and data should be standardised and/or shared via technology implementations.
Many enterprise architecture treatments focus only on optimising the platform architecture of the enterprise. This makes many enterprise architecture discussions far too technical. Also, from an implementation perspective, standardisation on platforms may actually be too expensive to ever implement; while at the same time it may provide less value to the enterprise than other initiatives could have. Discussions on enterprise architecture that fall into this category may in fact reduce IT spend while losing focus on the knowledge and related IT capabilities which could increase the value of IT.
One book that doesn’t fall into this trap is Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution