I’ll be presenting three Enterprise Architecture case studies on Monday at a joint Birmingham BCS Branch and Professional Institute Network West Midlands (PIN WM) event called “Case Studies of Enterprise Architecture”.

The event, 6:00pm for 6:30pm until 8:30pm, on Monday the 18th of February, 2008, is being held in the Trophy Suite of the Tally Ho Sports & Conference Centre (Pershore Road, Birmingham, B5 7RN, next to the Police Training College).

Your welcome to come along and see me present and talk on the subject, and if you do come along because of reading this blog entry then make sure you say “Hello”.

There’s more information on the Birmingham BCS Branch event page “Case Studies of Enterprise Architecture” (and is also listed with PIN WM too).

There’s a free buffet available from 6pm. Please contact Walter Milner (w.w.milner-AT-bham.ac-DOT-uk) if you intend to be present, so the amount of food and drink for the buffet can be planned.

For those not familiar with Enterprise Architecture, my current definition is:

Enterprise Architecture is a technical discipline concerned with gaining a contextual understanding of an IT estate, so that IT estate can be described, communicated, managed, and planned for.

N.B. Don’t be overtly concerned with the use of the word ‘contextual’ here, substitute ‘High Level’ or ‘Big Picture’ if that feels more comfortable.

Large (and, increasingly, smaller) enterprises have embraced Enterprise Architecture as a key tool to interpret and strategically manage the complexity of their IT estates, and it’s not surprising that many of them have assembled large teams and spent many millions of pounds to achieve an ‘Enterprise Architecture’.

These case studies explore my experiences with Enterprise Architecture in three major customer engagements, including an Enterprise Architecture team which led its company into a 70+ million pound ‘pitfall’, the use of Enterprise Architecture to define a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and an example of how much Enterprise Architecture is about achieving the proper Governance model.

Look forward to seeing you there…