"What is enterprise architecture?" (450 words)
What makes things tick? The brick and mortar construction of an architectural masterpiece, can be compared to the fiber and silicon of a wickedly fast company network. In fact this very back-bone of productivity, fast/effective communication, and secure storage can be over laid with functions of real physical people positions in a company.

"Imagine if the architecture of your business were a line and block chart, much like the hierarchy of the CEO right on down to the bottom of the barrel with the guy that pulls staples from extra copies of briefings before they are shred. A firewall is really like those spooks that work in security and policy review, the ones that want to poke in your lunch back when you leave a secured area or who READ YOUR EMAIL. Routers on the network are like switch or call center operators, they better have a clearly defined set of rules or you'll never get anything accomplished. Printers are akin to scribes and 'learned' men from the 12th century who knew how to put ink to parchment and document life around them. Client terminals are like the average joe-worker bee, they are all over the place and can perform a whole variety of functions. Super analytic terminals or number crunching workstations can be compared to the clairvoyant division chief, who always seems to quickly cut to the chase, and get to the heart of a matter. The wizard of an old man down the street who has a memory like an elephant, and never forgets a thing, is like the back-up server locked in a closet in the back of the building.

Milton (that really nice old guy) who sits diligently at the front security desk, and has to inspect all the badges of everyone coming or going, is like user authentication when you log-in to your terminal daily. Of course there are some things that always seem the same, snail mail post man/woman, is like the Apache server who handles all the email on the company LAN. Mail is mail, but by some many other names. And good old CHAT, that server is really like that horrible gossip that sits by the coffee pot and has to share every speck of tawdry "news" she hears with anyone that will stop more then 5 minutes to listen to her rabble. On that note, some architecture enterprise applications are aptly named, if you have heard of PIDGIN, a chat tool, well and I guess you might make the connection between pooping gray birds delivering notes and that nice place to gossip, make dinner plans with the girls and/or fellas, and a general place to go way off tangent in the work place (yes, yes, it can always be productive t00).

All in all, there is not much in the enterprise architecture of a computer network that can't be compared to the interrelationship and disposition of all levels of human management. NO ONE likes an cheating and undependable toad in the road co-workers, and NO ONE likes a sluggish and virus riddled local area network.