Review By: Harry L. Kirkpatrick
06/02/2005Architecture is a discipline that is well understood and defined in the construction industry, but unfortunately poorly understood and implemented in technology. This results in systems that do not inter-operate well and have difficulty in providing the required functionality for the enterprise. Technology is a complex and diverse industry. Without an enterprise approach to guide technology, there is a large chance for continued failures that hamper profitability.

The success of enterprise architecture requires an outcome of value to an organization, limiting the amount of resources to design and maintain the architecture. Lightweight Enterprise Architectures provides a lightweight methodology and philosophy that is easily adoptable by most organizations and quickly provides value. In addition, this approach avoids most of the pitfalls of traditional architectural styles, which tend to be over-engineered.

The style of this book is clear and understandable to a diverse audience, ranging from the small technical firms to large corporations. The audience for this book includes, but is not limited to, architects, senior managers, technical managers, engineers, programmers, technical operations staff, and business managers.

Lightweight Enterprise Architecture provides an approach that Theuerkorn has developed throughout his career to enable a quick alignment of technology to business strategy. The intention of this book is not to introduce new jargon, but rather to base this approach on existing architectural artifacts that are successfully deployed in organizations. The true value of this methodology lies not in developing new terms or diagrams, but in developing a clear systematic approach that uses the right balance of tools and techniques an enterprise needs to develop its architecture successfully.