Gartner: enterprise architects need to get in the game, literally

Gartner analyst Philip Allega didn't mince words in a recent post: enterprise architects, he says, need to let go of the "command-and-control" model of traditional EA to make business transformation and agility a reality.

In essence, Allega states, EAs and their business clients need access to simulations and gaming models that provide a greater visual understanding of the interactions that take place across the enterprise between people and systems.

Allega defines “visualization, simulation and optimization for enterprise architecture” as the following:

"...the virtual lifelike representations of the behaviors or characteristics used to predict behavior among components comprising the enterprise (business processes, applications, data, technologies) in conceptual, logical and physical systems, including interactions with their environments, over multiple states in time (current and multiple future and transitional states) for the purposes of determining the best-fit future state."

Allega observes that there already is movement toward this "alternative means to engage in EA," and has even taken a place as an emerging practice on Gartner's hype cycle.