Meeting with John L. King (hi to Michael D. Cohen)

I was in Michigan yesterday to meet with Dean John L. King about my new paper. It was great to meet John again, and I got to say hi to the famous Dr. Michael D. Cohen who invented the Garbage Can Model for organizational choice…
As always, John’s insightful perspectives on my academic progress was brilliant. He always brings my views to a higher level of abstraction and he is a great academic role model for me. John has published more than 150 articles and five books on the relationship between technical and social change, so his horizon is incredible. We did not talk so much about the actual article, but spend most of our time discussing the enterprise architecture concept. John is (as many academics) very critical towards new buzzwords, and we talked about the mapping of the actual words “Enterprise” and “architecture” and the use of the word in public agencies. It was an interesting discussion that really made me rethink a couple of my quick conclusions about the nature of this beast.
Maybe EA is just old wine in new bottles? I do not think so, but it is a fact that EA does nothing if we just see it as another fad in the long history of abbreviations in the IT field. Based on my findings here in the US, John suggested a good distinction between the agencies what are “Performative” and “Transformative”. OMB compliance and slideware does not do the job alone – it is about taking EA seriously and transforming the way information systems planning is conducted!