Prakash C. Rao

More than 25 years ago, I was one of three young, energetic, bright-eyed entrepreneurs who left their corporate nests to start a company when it was neither fashionable or cool to be a startup, especially east of the Mississippi - in the heart of Minnesota. We struggled with the business model, the direction for the business, and fumbled with the operations as we tried to get our arms around a resource poor venture that our lush corporate careers had not trained us to manage. Those were the days when banks who had treated us as valuable customers would not even give us a small loan on the strength of our fledgling company. We took on odd jobs and earned money any way we could to keep the concern going. Subsequently we gained focus, began to concentrate our energies, got organized better, worked out our own interpersonal issues and finally managed to get the company on track. We went on to "shop" our business plans after initial successes to many sources of capital and wound up signing a deal with a venture capitalist in a down economy. Those harrowing days of flailing around with many aspects of the business that I with all my training - as Engineering Manager, a Researcher and a person trained in Strategic Planning, Business Planning and Operations, Engineering Management, Dynamics of Leadership in a Fortune 100 Corporation - found difficult, was the inspiration and start of a passion for using enterprise architecture to plan and guide the enterprise on the one hand, and the strategic use of information as a weapon for competitive advantage on the other. Around the early 1990s, the Cold War was drawing to a close and the need for USAF planes carrying nuclear weapons remaining on alert in the sky twenty four hours a day, being aerially refueled to stay aloft were drawing to a close. A realignment of forces was inevitably occurring and a major US Air Force Command was being set up from components of multiple existing major commands. I was catapulted into the world of a new science called enterprise architecture used as a planning tool for such major realignments of existing enterprises to form a new one from many pieces that came together - pieces of organization units, pieces of missions, pieces of specialties, pieces of IT equipment, and fragmented IT systems. John Zachman and the late Dr. Steven Spewak were beginning to test their theories on enterprise architecture (as consultants to the Air Force) and we lived in exciting times where theory met the first impact of the real world. As we built the enterprise architecture for that major command, we zigged and zagged for many years - graduallyconverting that enterprise to a state where it could support US military operations in several wars on multiple fronts with air transportation and refueling capabilities. This initial interest in enterprise architecture and the contact with the founders of this emerging science has been the basis of my passion and continued deep interest over the last twenty years. My books written with co-authors who have the same passion - are attempts to bring that powerful thinking to a wider audience. My hope is that the large failure rate of enterprise projects may be reduced by a wider and deeper understanding of the enterprise architecture that forms the context for these types of projects.