More Insights Without More Effort: Polymetric Modelling and Visual Intelligence in Enterprise Architecture

How can enterprise architects extract far more insight from their models without significantly increasing the effort required?

The effort required to collect, validate, analyse, and report on enterprise architecture information is itself one of the biggest obstacles to EA delivering value — and yet most approaches simply accept that effort as a given. This 2013 presentation by Graham McLeod challenges that assumption directly, arguing that the right combination of integrated meta models, inferencing, derived values, and visual techniques can dramatically increase the insight produced by an EA repository without requiring proportionally more effort to maintain it. A particularly compelling section introduces polymetric diagramming — a technique that modifies the visual properties of model symbols (size, colour, shape, border width, position) based on the actual data values of the objects they represent, turning what would otherwise be static structural diagrams into rich, information-dense pictures that exploit the human visual system's innate ability to detect patterns, movement, and anomalies. Worked examples show function models where symbol width reflects delay time, process models where width maps to duration, height to cost, and colour intensity to resource consumption, and application maps clustered and sized by investment or number of non-standard interfaces. The underlying architecture — a separation of logical model types from their visual representations, with polymetric specifications scripted in a flexible DSL — is implemented in Pharo Smalltalk using the Mondrian and Roassal graphics libraries and the EVA Graphical Modeler. For practitioners wrestling with the gap between the volume of data in their EA repositories and the quality of insight they can extract from it, this presentation offers both a compelling vision and a concrete technical path.

Originally presented by Graham McLeod at an Inspired event, September 2013.

Engaging Real Business People in Real Business Architecture

Why do business executives avoid enterprise architecture — and how do you get them genuinely engaged?

The complaint is common among IT architects: business executives won't engage with enterprise architecture, leaving the whole effort directionless. But as this 2009 presentation by Graham McLeod argues, the real problem lies with what is typically presented to business people as "business architecture" — a technically framed, detail-heavy, IT-grown discipline that offers little of immediate relevance to the executives who actually own the business. Delivered at The Open Group EA Practitioners Conference in London, the presentation sets out both a diagnosis and a remedy. The diagnosis: most EA has grown upward from IT rather than downward from business strategy, and neither TOGAF nor most frameworks at the time adequately captured the full scope of genuine business architecture — context, markets, products, channels, customers, scenarios, and cross-cutting concerns like cost, risk, quality, and governance. The remedy: a comprehensive business architecture meta model, drawn from Inspired and PROMIS experience across banking, healthcare, assurance, telecommunications, and government, that gives executives models they recognise as their own. A particularly practical section addresses how architects must shift their role — from technical experts presenting conclusions to skilled facilitators asking good questions, holding up a mirror, and ensuring that models and content belong to the business rather than the architecture team. The presentation closes with specific suggestions for how TOGAF should expand its treatment of business architecture.

Originally presented by Graham McLeod at The Open Group EA Practitioners Conference (EAPC), London, UK, April 2009.

Meta Meta Model Extensions for Managing Large-Scale Collaborative EA Modelling

How do you extend enterprise architecture meta models to keep large-scale collaborative modelling manageable?

When enterprise architecture modelling moves beyond a single expert working alone — across teams, organisations, time zones, and languages — the meta model that was perfectly adequate for small-scale work begins to break down. Ownership conflicts, information overload, incompatible versions, and variable data quality all emerge as serious practical obstacles. This 2008 presentation by Graham McLeod, delivered at EMMSAD 2008 (Exploring Modelling Methods for Systems Analysis and Design), addresses these challenges head-on with a set of formal but pragmatic extensions to EA meta models and meta meta models, developed through real-world experience building and operating the EVA collaborative repository. The core constructs introduced include context — a powerful, reusable mechanism that operates at the meta meta level and addresses domain, ownership, authority, timeframe, status, and language in a unified way; relationship typing, which brings precision to how model elements connect; and a model type abstraction that subsumes graphical models, documents, reports, and user interfaces under a single coherent concept. A three-layer object architecture — implemented in Smalltalk — is shown to be essential for the flexibility required, with filters implemented as a specialisation of model type and time, version, and baseline tracking unified through relationships. The resulting conceptual model is notably compact given the range of challenges it addresses, and the presentation is candid about both the expressiveness achieved and the performance challenges encountered in implementation. For practitioners building or evaluating EA repository tooling, this is a rare account of what the meta model level actually needs to look like in production.

Originally presented by Graham McLeod at EMMSAD 2008 (Exploring Modelling Methods for Systems Analysis and Design), Montpellier, France, June 2008.

Service Orientation in Enterprise Architecture: Beyond Surface-Level Support

How should enterprise architecture frameworks and meta models be extended to provide genuine, deep support for service orientation?

Service orientation reshapes how applications are conceived, how systems are integrated, and ultimately how value is delivered to customers — yet most enterprise architecture frameworks treat it as a technical implementation detail rather than an architectural concern that spans the full enterprise stack. This 2008 presentation by Graham McLeod, delivered in his role as CTO of PROMIS Solutions AG, argues that achieving deep support for service orientation in EA requires rethinking frameworks and meta models from the ground up. The presentation distinguishes carefully between technical, application, information, and business services, and between logical service definitions — independent of technology and implementation — and their physical realisation, insisting that the mapping between these two levels is essential for meaningful planning and governance. A key architectural insight is the treatment of modern applications not as monolithic systems but as malleable bundles of functions exposed as services, where components can be replaced without impacting overall service delivery — a view that has significant implications for how application architecture is modelled. The presentation also addresses what it calls "enrichment": the additional concepts needed to govern services effectively, including intent (benchmarks, goals, objectives), responsibility and ownership, cross-cutting concerns (risk, cost, quality), and built-in computation and analysis. Archimate is proposed as a candidate notation for distinguishing domains and logical versus physical layers, with worked examples showing how service cross-referencing and traceability can be achieved in practice.

Originally presented by Graham McLeod at an Inspired/PROMIS event, December 2008.

Breaking the EA Bottleneck: Collaborative and Distributed Enterprise Modelling

How can enterprise architecture move beyond the central "oracle" model to become a truly collaborative, distributed discipline?

The central architect as "oracle" — a single expert who holds all the knowledge and dispenses answers to those willing to make the pilgrimage — is a familiar and dysfunctional pattern in enterprise architecture. It creates bottlenecks, slows delivery, produces models that lack buy-in, and makes it almost impossible to integrate the perspectives of business, process, data, application, and technology teams who each hold a piece of the picture. This 2007 tutorial by Graham McLeod, delivered at the CAiSE conference in Trondheim, tackles this problem head-on with a comprehensive framework for collaborative, distributed enterprise modelling. The tutorial covers the full stack of enablers: shared meta models and naming standards as the foundation for integration; a structured process for identifying participants, educating them, collecting architecture elements, organising hierarchies, and building cross-domain relationships; and tool support that enables distributed teams to capture, relate, model, and share architecture content across geographies and time zones. A particularly useful section distinguishes the roles of framework, meta model, method, and repository tool — clarifying how each contributes to making collaboration work in practice. The benefits are concrete: higher quality inputs, faster results, greater organisational awareness, and significantly higher levels of architectural compliance, precisely because the people who need to act on the architecture helped build it.

Originally presented by Graham McLeod as a tutorial at CAiSE 2007 (19th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering), Trondheim, Norway, 2007.

What Should an EA Management Tool Actually Do?

What are the requirements for a truly effective enterprise architecture management tool — and how should one be designed?

The tools most organisations use to manage enterprise architecture — spreadsheets, presentation software, drawing tools — were built for entirely different purposes, and the gap shows. This 2005 presentation by Graham McLeod takes a rigorous look at what a purpose-built EA management tool actually needs to do, synthesising requirements from Zachman, Spewak, Schekkerman, TOGAF, and real-world RFPs into a comprehensive checklist spanning repository design, meta-modelling, collaboration, security, reporting, and governance support. The presentation then describes the design of Archi/WebModeler, Inspired's own web-based EA repository, and how its architecture addresses these requirements — including a runtime-extensible meta model, rich content types, inferencing and computation capabilities, visual modelling, and scenario management. Particularly notable is the emphasis on making the tool useful not just to enterprise architects but to the full range of stakeholders involved in EA: strategic planners, programme managers, risk managers, sponsors, and domain architects. For practitioners evaluating EA tooling or building the case for a dedicated repository, this presentation remains a clear-eyed benchmark of what good looks like.

Originally presented by Graham McLeod at an Inspired event, 2005.