A Simple Diagram Showing Everything

My first introduction to anything resembling Enterprise Architecture was in the bowels of a large telecommunications company in Hong Kong,

A new boss of the IT engineering group had arrived and was trying to get his head around the significant scale and scope of the kit he was responsible for.

Can you create for me ‘A simple diagram showing everything’ was the request he gave to me. Given this was the early 1990s a non trivial request.

Given the plethora of systems on the floor there wasn’t enough space on the page. After a couple of weeks iterating this became obvious and through the task was outsourced to IBM who produced a twenty page document.

The task served its purpose. In a way that was my first introduction to enterprise architecture like thinking. Before enterprise architecture became a thing.

My last memory of that document was seeing it on a shelf dusty and bereft during one of our regular moves.