EA 872 Week12: An EA Initiative for a Knight Rider Prototype!

For this week, I am going to blog about some rambling thoughts I had while driving on a long road trip recently. I had rented myself a nice late model luxury sedan equipped with latest technology gadgets and bluetooth streaming. Cruising on the highway, enjoying the drive, I suddenly had a strange “Eureka” moment. Now who of us , or at least of my generation, has not seen Knight Rider, the famous tv show, and fell in love with that car and especially the computer KITT! I remember I was a kid watching that show and was totally fascinated by the idea of having a car that not only has an Artificial Intelligence (AI) but also can auto drive and do all different AI related tasks. (Ok the turbo boost and the leaping jumps might have pushed it too far mechanically wise but hold on to that critique for the end).

The reason I’m mentioning all of this is because it just occurred to me at the moment that we have all the technology out there though in discrete pieces. We have the AI, think Siri, and much more. We have the auto driving car, think Google and again much more. So all what is needed is for someone to take the initiative to bring the two together and voila, we would have a real Knight Rider KITT!

So for the sake of adding some EA context to this subject, let’s imagine a task assigned to a new EA team for an initiative to build our Knight Rider from these two discrete businesses with different processes, products, and technology. One could argue that the approach is a standard EA approach to a model that supports merging the two companies products and resembles a migration from a diversification operating model to a coordination one. Another argument would go for a unification model since an AI needs to be able to assist in the info and general access to the knowledge pool for real scenario decision making (ex. an answer to an inquiry about a geo location or weather or other). At the same time, it needs to control the dynamics of the car drivability by not only relying on the sensors data but also drawing from all archived data from other cars data and other played scenarios both historic and enriched data. 

It is definitely an interesting idea and line of thought. I will try to expand on how this can be an interesting EA exercise in future blogs but for now, I will leave you with the thought that Knight Rider is probably something you will see in the near future, and instead of “ Knight Rider, coming soon to a theater near you”, it will be “Knight Rider, coming soon to a dealer near you” !

Reference:

Ross, J. W., Weill, P., & Robertson, D. (2006). Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press.