This document provides an overview of Mikkel H Brahm's background and work in enterprise architecture. Some key points: - Brahm has over 20 years of experience in change management and IT, with a special interest in enterprise architecture, business design, and strategizing. - He views enterprise architecture as a discipline for holistically leading enterprise changes in response to disruptive forces, to achieve desired business outcomes. It does this through analyzing changes and making recommendations to adjust projects. - Brahm takes a reflective approach to enterprise architecture, drawing from theories of social science and complex responsive processes. He sees meaning as negotiated between people, and organizations as continually evolving through these interactions. - Brahm's work emphasizes

1. Organizations
of interdependent people
working together
Mikkel H Brahm

2. Chief Enterprise Architect
Mikkel Haugsted Brahm
• 20+ years experience with change management involving IT
• Special interest in Enterprise Architecture, Strategizing, Business Design
• Practical IT (Datamatiker & Datanom) from Business College 1993/’99
• Wanted to help businesses develop by developing supporting IT for them
• Diploma (HD-O) from Copenhagen Business School 2007
• Grappled with how a business actually controls the development of its IT
• Enrolled in Doctor of Managament (PhD) programme 2014-2017
• Basis in Complex Responsive Processes of Relating and Narrative Inquiry
• Emerging themes: Power, Domination, Expertise, Judgement, Materiality

3. So, what is my field of work then?
• Enterprise architecture (EA) is a discipline for proactively and holistically leading
enterprise responses to disruptive forces by identifying and analyzing the
execution of change toward desired business vision and outcomes.
• EA delivers value by presenting business and IT leaders with signature-ready
recommendations for adjusting policies and projects to achieve target business
outcomes that capitalize on relevant business disruptions.
• EA is used to steer decision making toward the evolution of the future state
architecture.
Source: Gartner IT Glossary, 2014

4. My interpretation of what Gartner says EA is
• I have to find someone who knows the future and get him to spill his guts,
so that I can get “desired business vision and outcomes” from that
• Then I have to stand outside the organisation I am a part of
to find out where it is going “identifying and analyzing the execution of change”
• Now I just have to dominate everybody
into changing direction to where I want them to go, using
“signature-ready recommendations for adjusting policies and projects”
• And to get help in dominating everyone else,
I should start by dominating top management, i.e.
“steer decision making”

5. The Zachman Framework
• the Zachman Framework is a
schema, not a methodology,
and it does not imply anything
about how you do EA…
• The framework is like a
Periodic Table, it deals with
the elementary composition
of descriptive representations.
In any science, you have to
discover the elementary
structure before anything
becomes predictable and
repeatable.
Source: A conversation with John Zachman in Journal of Enterprise Architecture, 2005, Volume 1, Number 1

6. Our roots in natural sciences
General Systems Theory

7. Strategic Choice and Systems Theory
• Both cybernetic and cognitivism … take the position of the objective observer
who stands outside the system of interest and makes hypotheses about it. They
build models of the system to guide behaviour. The emphasis is on the ability to
control.
• We say, 'The wind is blowing', as if the wind were actually a thing at rest which, at
a given point in time, begins to move and blow… Our language tend to place at
the forefront of our attention … the character of things in a state of rest.
Furthermore, they tend to express all change and action … as something
additional rather than integral…
• This constant process-reduction results in the changeless aspects of all
phenomena being interpreted as most real and significant.
Source: Ralph Stacey, Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management
Source: Norbert Elias, What is Sociology

8. Being reflective and reflexive
taking experience serious
• Empirical research in a reflective mode starts from a sceptical approach to what
appear at a superficial glance as unproblematic replicas of the way reality
functions, while at the same time maintaining the belief that the study of suitable
(well thought out) excerpts from this reality can provide an important basis for a
generation of knowledge that opens up rather than closes, and furnishes
opportunities for understanding rather than establishes ‘truths’.
• The idea that measurements, observations, the statements of interview
subjects… have an unequivocal or unproblematic relationship to anything outside
the empirical material is rejected on principle.
• Interpretation comes to the forefront of the research work… Reflection can, in
the context of empirical research, be defined as the interpretation of
interpretation and the launching of a critical self-exploration of one’s own
interpretations of empirical material (including its construction).
Source: Mats Alvesson and Kaj Sköldberg, Reflexive Methodology – New Vistas for Qualitative Research

9. Individual behaviour versus the Social Act
meaning emerges from gestures and responses

10. George Herbert Mead
Gesture and response processes
• Mead … thought of one body making a gesture to another body where the gesture calls
out, or evokes, a response from that other body. That response is itself a gesture back to
the first body which, in turn, evokes a further response. What we have, then, is ongoing
responsive processes, which Mead called the conversation of gestures, where
beginnings and endings are purely arbitrary.
• Gesture and response can never be separated - they are moments in one act
• Consciousness => significant symbol => evoke similar responses in gesturer as in the
person gestured to
• Gesture and response together constitute a social act in which meaning arises for both
so that knowing is a property of interaction, or relationship
Source: Ralph Stacey, Strategic Management and Orgnisational Dynamics,
Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management

11. George Herbert Mead
The I/me dialogue

12. The individual
the atomic unit of social?

13. Family
Sailing
Work
Norbert Elias
Relationships as the atomic unit of social
Child
FatherFather
Subordinate
Mother
Manager
Son
Daughter
Subordinate
Instructor
Wife
Club secretary
Competitor
Colleague

14. Norbert Elias
Functional dependency => Power figuration
• Whether the power differentials are large or small, balances of power are always
present wherever there is functional interdependence between people.
• We say that a person possesses great power, as if power were a thing he carried about
in his pocket… Power is not an amulet possessed by one person and not by another; it
is a structural characteristic of human relationships – of all human relationships.
• Concepts of balances are far more adequate for what can actually be observed in
investigating the nexus of functions which interdependent human beings have for each
other, than are concepts modelled on stationary objects.
• Function must be understood as a concept of relationship. We can only speak of social
functions when referring to interdependencies which constrain people to a greater
and lesser extend [and paradoxically simultaneously enables people].
Source: Norbert Elias, What is Sociology?

15. James C Scott
Public transcript and Hidden transcript
• By controlling the public stage, the dominant can create an appearance that
approximates what, ideally, they would want subordinates to see. The deception
– or propaganda – they devise may add padding to their stature but it will also
hide whatever might detract from their grandeur and authority.
• The point of [hierarchies] is simply that they assume that there are no horizontal
links among subordinates and that … the master represents the only link joining
them… they are mere atoms with no social existence.
• The hidden transcript is a social product and hence the result of power relations
among subordinates... [it] exists only to the extend it is practiced, articulated,
enacted, and disseminated within these offstage social sites.
• The social spaces where the hidden transcript grows are themselves an
achievement of resistance; they are won and defended in the teeth of power.
Source: James C Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance – Hidden Transcripts

16. Different ways of knowing
• Novice > Advanced Beginner > Competent > Proficient > Expert
• The novice adheres rigidly to rules and plans, shows no sensitivity to context and does
not exercise discretionary judgment.
• Those who reach capacities of proficiency and expertise do not rely on rules at all, and
insisting that rules be followed amounts to the destruction of proficiency and expertise.
• Episteme (universal knowledge), Techne (craft or art) and Phronesis (practical judgement)
• Phronetic knowledge is acquired through experience, and can only be understood by
taking a reflective stance in relation to that experience. Since that experience is always
social, phronesis is essentially a social way of knowing.
• Phronetic knowledge is very difficult to articulate and cannot be reduced to rules,
principles or propositions, which means that the tools and techniques of technical
rationality cannot produce the kind of practical judgment required of an expert.
Source: [Aristotle in] Ralph Stacey, Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management
Source: Dreyfus & Dreyfus, Mind over Machine

17. Robert Jackall
Rehearsal and Judgement calls
• Rehearsals may prepare one principally for the ongoing internal organizational
drama… rehearsals often focus on developing ”defensible” rationales for action.
• First, managers cast around a variety of perspectives in order to ”cover all the
bases” and see the situation at hand from many angles of vision.
• … it becomes clear … that certain explanations rather than others should be the
point of focus.
• … the decisive moment … comes when a managerial circle, or key members of it,
decides that a certain rationale ”is the way to go”, one with which they ”feel
comfortable.”.. The measure of that comfort becomes a confidence in the
casuistry necessary to persuade others that one’s stories are plausible and one’s
choices reasonable.
• Rehearsal also encourage the most subtle form of hype, namely convincing
oneself of one’s own rectitude.
Source: Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes – the world of corporate managers

18. Hannah Arendt
Final Speech
• The trouble with a Nazi criminal like Eichmann was that he insisted on
renouncing all personal qualities, as if there was nobody left to be either
punished or forgiven. He protested time and again, contrary to the Prosecution's
assertions, that he had never done anything out of his own initiative, that he had
no intentions whatsoever, good or bad, that he had only obeyed orders.
• Since Socratis and Plato we usually call thinking to be engaged in that silent
dialogue between me and myself. In refusing to be a person Eichmann utterly
surrendered that single most defining human quality, that of being able to think.
And consequently he was no longer capable of making moral judgements.
• The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge, but the ability to tell
right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And I hope that thinking gives people the
strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are
down.

19. Complex Responsive Processes of Relating
a theory of social action
• Patterns of social interaction emerge across a population in myriad local
interactions.
• Local interactions are complex responsive processes of relating encompassing
communicative interaction, relations of power, and the desires, ambitions,
intentions and choices of interdependent individuals which reflect values and
norms, that is, ideologies.
• Patterns of communication, forms of power, norms and values all emerge through
the interplay of individual and group choices in local interaction.
• Since the patterns are arising in local interactions, they cannot be designed or
intended, as a whole.
• Whole patterns are dynamically reproduced from moment to moment in local
habitual interactions, and it is in these local interactions that they also, at the
same time, change.
Source: Ralph Stacey, Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management

20. Being in command, but not in control

21. What is organisation or organising?
… and how do you then participate in changes thereof?
• Whenever people do something together, they also organise the
“doing together” of what they do – this is organising/organisation
• Power arises from interdependency and is never equally distributed
• Organisation and power figurations are always in flux (i.e. no “states”)
• Meaning is negotiated in the Social Act of gesture/response
• We can participate in organising and thus in change, but not control it
• If we are perceptive and reflexive we can help to deepen the social
understanding of the changes we participate in
• Expertise is not achieved by following prescriptive rules or
methodologies, but through reflecting on experience

22. What is Enterprise?
… and how do you then architect it?
• Business transactions in which our organization is an involved party
also involve other organisations
• To mitigate lack of control dominating powers have emerged in the
civilising process such as “kings” and “judges” i.e. the “legal system”
• Business parties/contracts are also legal entities/agreements
• The market has the processes, information and technologies of the
enterprise(s) our organisation participates in
• Thus enterprise architecture emerges in a wider market, is never in
any steady state and emerges without our direct control

23. Comments and Questions