Samuel Holcman: Thank you for tuning in to Real Talk. Be sure to join your host Sam Holcman again for another edition of our program. We'll have more Real Topics of discussion then. How do you sort out the so-called jargon from real-world practices that work? Do the members of your organization find some business or technology advice utterly confusing? Welcome to Real Talk with Sam Holcman. In this program, we set the record straight and in terms that business people and technology people can understand. Now, here is your host, Sam Holcman. You are flying Atlas missions in a New Glenn world. This is Real Talk with Sam Holcman. Hi, I'm Sam Holcman. I want to talk to you about legacy thinking. Not old thinking, not wrong thinking, but thinking that was right, sometimes brilliantly right, and then calcified into doctrine. Look up at the sky. Something remarkable just happened in space. Blue Origin flew New Glenn, their massive orbital class rocket, for the third time. And they flew it on a booster that already landed and was refurbished. The same first stage, flying again. This is not a space story. This is a legacy story. And yes, there was a glitch. on cargo release. Here's the contrast that should wake everyone up. Blue Origin designed New Glenn's engines to burn liquefied natural gas, not the old kerosene that everyone else relied on. Why does that matter? Because methane burns cleaner, less soot, less carbon buildup, which means you can reuse engines without tearing them completely apart in between flights. They did not just decide to try reusability. They designed, architected for reusability at the propulsion level from the very start. The architecture was built for that mission. Now, let's look at United Launch Alignment, United Launch Alliance. For decades, the undisputed king of American launch services. over hundreds of consecutive successful national security missions. An incredible, remarkable track record. And today, for sale. With almost no buyers willing to take it at any price. ULA did not fail because its engineers were incompetent or lost knowledge. They failed because their architecture their business model, their supply chain, their rocket design. were inherited from a paradigm that assumed rockets were expendable and that launch prices were fixed high and that government contracts would always be there. Boeing and Lockheed, the parent companies, it is said, actively blocked ULA from expanding into new markets. The legacy protected itself and when the world moved on, there was no adaptive capacity left. Now, stay with me here, because the exact same pattern is playing out in enterprise and business architecture right now. The legacy EA and BA vendors, and you know who they are, the exam-based certifications, the multiple choice exams and frameworks, the base of knowledge that has not changed in any meaningful way in years, just more pages since they achieved success in certification numbers. I'll give it to them. But success became institutionalized. The certification became the thing itself. Organizations stopped asking whether the certification and framework served their mission and started asking whether the mission was being performed according to the certification and framework. Absolutely backwards. Yes, exam revenues grew. Vendors' ecosystems formed. Consulting firms built enormous practices predicated on the paradigm's perpetuation. And the paradigm began to actively resist conditions that require it to change. Yes, the paradigm itself began to actively resist the conditions that were required to change. And here's why legacy EA and BA models actually produces. Here is what they produced yesterday, and here is what they produced today. A candidate spends weeks memorizing constructs. They sit for a multiple choice exam, they pass, and they are now, in quotes, certified. Now, they arrive at their first engagement with that certificate and no demonstrated ability to produce an architecture that a technology or business executive can use to make consequential decisions. The organization paid for a credential. It received a credential. No architecture was built. No business outcomes were advanced. Unfortunately, that is the enterprise architecture and business architecture equivalent of ULA promising next generation LOSH vehicles while continuing to fly the same Atlas V it had operated since the Cold War. Now. EACoE and BEC were not built on improving the existing paradigm. They were built from first principles asking fundamentally different questions. Not, how do we certify knowledge by asking questions of a framework, but how do we produce enterprise architects and business architects who can walk into a complex organization and design real solutions that business executives will use to make decisions that matter? EACoE and BACoE certified practitioners based on quality of architecture work performed, actual models, actual analysis, actual stakeholder consumable products. The methodology starts with enterprise goals and management intent, then derives information process capabilities and technologies as logical consequences. Business architecture is not a preamble to the real work. It's the prime mover of the entire enterprise. and in an era where AI systems will consume your architecture artifacts as data, semantic precision is the difference between an architecture that enables AI and one that actually undermines it. Blue Origin designed its engines for reuse before the first flight ever happened. EACoE and BAC were designed to produce practitioners who can contribute on Monday morning. because the training is done on real work, using real methods, producing real deliverables. That's not a marketing claim. That's an architectural consequence. The organizations that are still building their EA practices around exam and associated frameworks that certify by passing exams rather than capability that produce documentation rather than decisions that treat enterprise architecture and IT governance function rather than a strategic business design Discipline, those organizations are in the exact same position ULA was five years ago. They are flying ⁓ missions in a New Glenn world. The New Paradigm is not coming. It has arrived. The only question left is whether your organization will be the one catching up ⁓ hopefully, the one leading the way. I'm Sam Holcman. This has been Real Talk. Please reach out to us at www.eacoe.org or www.bacoe.org to join the new Glenn world. It will be my pleasure to speak with you on a no-fee review of your requirements.