r.EA.Arnold

If different landscape types and their interrelationships are not sufficiently differentiated and methodically recognized, they will be inadequately identified, planned, designed, implemented, and managed over their lifecycles. Therefore, differentiating landscape asset types is as important as clarifying the key relationships that exist between them.

> A landscape is a defined area of management interests within an enterprise.

The components of landscapes are landscape assets, while landscapes are in turn components of the enterprise landscape (enterprise domain).

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> A landscape asset is an architecture asset that contributes to the formation of a landscape.

Typical examples of landscape assets are service, application, platform, information,ortechnology. However, none of these (or similar) asset categories are unambiguously defined. Even standard architecture modeling languages, like ArchiMate,117 provide modeling elements that require further specification and adaptation to enterprise contexts.

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ARNOLD, Ingo, 2022. Enterprise Architecture Function: A Pattern Language for Planning, Design and Execution. Cham: Springer International Publishing. ISBN 978-3-030-84588-9. doi

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When I reached the peak of my frustration curve, I took stock of what I saw going wrong frequently when using architecture frameworks. Next, I analyzed why this was happening. At a very high level, the what can be traced to one, surprisingly common, misconception: the extremely unfounded expectation that a generic solution will completely satisfy the requirements of a specific problem. Generic solutions such as architecture frameworks propose generic best practices, techniques, and other responses to appropriately generic problems. However, concrete problems must be addressed by concrete solutions. Where concrete problems differ, concrete solutions differ as well.

When I wanted to understand why this is such a widespread misconception, I found it due to a paradox: The impressive amount of material that frameworks contain, their apparent completeness, supposed comprehensiveness, as well as their structuredness, loudly confirmed by a huge commercial ecosystem, give the strong impression that this is all you ever need and that you do not need to do or adapt anything else. I have seen architects with years of experience naively (i.e., 1:1) adopt generic framework practices for their concrete solutions. The real paradox is that the richer the framework, the worse it is applied. It is the heightened version of the well-known “a fool with a tool is still a fool” aphorism: “a fool with a tool is an armed fool”—armed in the sense that the fool has successfully immunized himself against the insight of being a fool in the first place.

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