Fundamentals of Enterprise Architecture

Chapter 10. Driving Behavior over Enforcing Standards

The third enterprise architecture principle in the very short manifesto for effective enterprise architecture is driving behavior over enforcing standards.

Chapters 2 and 5 talked about standards and requirements and the importance of both enabling and enforcing them. The principle of driving behavior over enforcing standards emphasizes this idea to say that while enforcement is important and necessary, especially in a well-managed, regulated environment, defining standards and requirements in terms of human behavior is even more valuable. This is because the quality of compliance depends on human behavior.

There are two broad categories for the quality of compliance:

Minimum

The minimum level of compliance is a pass or fail type of compliance against the minimum level of satisfaction to the standard or requirement.

Optimum

The optimum level of compliance is satisfying the minimum level and also doing more to get the most benefit out of the standard or requirement. This can get nuanced pretty quickly.

For example, let’s say there is an enterprise architecture standard to use a certain software programming language. The minimum level of compliance might be that the programming language is used. A more optimum level of usage might also consider the version used, best practices for managing memory and compute, using the right package manager, and using well-known, highly performant, vulnerability-free libraries.

Both the ...