EDGY Launch | Edging Towards a New Future

Despite the blog title I haven’t as yet broached the subject of what the future for Enterprise Architecture looks like, in part this was deliberate as I first wanted to cover some basics, but as today saw the official launch of the EDGY language from the Intersection Group I thought I should take a step towards that future.  

EDGY is ambitious, it is aiming to be a simple language which operates across multiple disciplines to simplify Enterprise Design and promote co-creation. Being able to maintain that simplicity and clarity of focus will be one of the major challenges as the language evolves and the community expands.  In its favour the language is specifically been designed to address these these challenges, keeping simplicity at its core and the continuously measured against the teenager test. The authors have not looked to replace existing tools and languages used for domain specific modelling and are in fact collaborating to provide connections to existing domain models and languages.  

EDGY is important not just in the scope of it’s ambition, to enable the co-creation of better enterprises,  but also in that nothing else has been designed specifically to operate in this space.  Efforts have been made to evolve domain models to cover this interconnect, but they come with the concepts and artefacts (baggage) evolved within the domain which brings., added complexity, and assumed paradigms which can act as a barrier to practitioners from other disciplines.  By creating a language to directly address the challenges of multi disciplinary collaboration and communication the authors are providing the glue that enables all practitioners and strategic decision makers to understand each other without diminishing or watering down existing well established domain specific languages and models.

This is extremely useful for EA practitioners in that it addresses one of the key challenges of enterprise architecture which is being able to both inform and direct decision makers and decision implementers. EDGY provides a way to  beautifully and simply communicate concepts such as value and purpose whilst still being able to interact with and shape deep domain models. 

Like all things simplicity comes at a cost and in EDGY that is in practitioners acknowledging the boundaries of domain specific complexity, whilst still modelling the important and cross cutting elements.

Learn more about EDGY here https://enterprise.design

Intersection Group