The 90% Rule of Enterprise Architecture
posted by John Spacey, October 19, 2011Sturgeon's Law states that 90% of everything is crap.
Theodore Sturgeon was an American science fiction writer.
He got tired of people criticizing the science fiction genre by pointing to examples of bad science fiction. Sturgeon argued that 90% of everything is crap — TV shows, lawyers, plumbers, movies, magazines, cars, etc. Therefore, the fact that 90% of science fiction is crap proves nothing.
The 90% Rule of Enterprise Architecture
If we apply Sturgeon's Law to enterprise architecture — we can say that 90% of solution architecture is flawed.This will ring true for anyone who has been involved in EA governance for a large organization. When you review dozens of multimillion dollar projects each month you start to realize how many of them have flawed architectures.
As a enterprise architect you need to pick and choose your battles. You can hardly stop every bad architecture from going live (unless you have some serious political capital).
Perhaps 90% is a good baseline target for EA governance. For example, if only 85% of your organization's solutions are flawed then you're doing well.
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