Enterprise Architecture in the NHS is alive with debate and creativity. The role of this branch of the profession –while sometimes overlooked– asserts itself especially in periods of change. That is normal in our extraordinary organisation, NHS England, where the complexity of the business and the challenges are in themselves a good reason to work here and do our best.
One of those challenges is –undoubtedly– the structure of the NHS as an organisation. The co-existence and articulation of multiple levels of operation and delivery, and the extensive, decentralised nature of the entities that we integrate.
For this reason, when we speak about Enterprise Architecture, we need to tune our concepts and go beyond monolithic architectures: Even the term “enterprise” is applicable only if we understand that we are not a single entity, but a layered, distributed, decentralised organism, where we can identify local, regional and national levels, but where each of those levels is composed of several units or divisions, geographically and functionally.
And so we need to speak of an “Ecosystem Architecture” and build the appropriate methods to consolidate requirements and articulate the levels and concerns we want to represent.
At first sight, the complexity may seem intractable, or we may settle for some simplification.
Contrary to that, I believe the proper path is one where we embrace complexity, and for that we need a good methodology.
I have been wanting to publish the attached material for several months now, the product of some research I did last year on the Axiomatic Design methodology. It is nothing original in itself, although I think the mapping of Axiomatic Design to the architecture layers has had little coverage in the literature.
I hope the attached slides at least show there is a practical and rational path for requirement cataloguing and consolidation across local, regional and national levels and organisations.
If the reader is motivated to consider how we can deal with the extraordinary challenges of Ecosystem Architecture, then I will have achieved my objective.