Revisiting Naur's Programming as Theory Building for Enterprise Architecture Modelling

The recent burgeoning interest in Enterprise Architecture and its focus on artifact driven methods is taken as a motivation for the re-appraisal of Peter Naur’s notion of “programming as theory building”. Naur strongly disputes the value of the role and orientation of the IS discipline around artifacts and argues that algorithmic methods do not lead to a theory of a domain. Such a viewpoint provides an alternative lens with which to view current developments and may lead to additional insights by providing the reader with a source for questioning and reflecting critically on the re-focusing of method design on conversation rather than artifact production . It is suggested that such a conversational framework based on Toulmin and Pask may provide a means to establish and test theory building views of enterprise architecture.