The author of this article from Federal Computer Week reported about the complexity of the Navy’s enterprise architecture:
Just as a city plan doesn’t include every detail about every building in the city, an overarching federated architecture must be generalized. Rather than try to model the details of specific systems, a federated architecture should represent activities. Systems come and go, but activities performed by an organization remain relatively constant, he said.
As part of this blog, we like to bring you the latest up to date information from across the EA industry. If you didn’t get a chance to view the latest webinar yesterday brought to you by EAC, here’s a great opportunity to view the archived recording of “Revisiting the Promise of SOA” presented by Peter Salvitti of Collaborative Consulting. In this webinar you can expect to learn:
Definitely take the time to view it at your own leisure as I’m sure you’ll find the information very valuable.
Iona Technologies, known for their specialization in service oriented architecture and middleware specialties, was bought by Progressive Software for $162 million, which equals $4.05 per share, according to this article at EWeek. The deal was announced on Wednesday, June 25. Board members at
Iona will be operated as a subsidiary according to this article at Information Week, and
According to this article here at Inside Architecture, a business is a collection of different people, and when working on projects across the organization, we need to make sure everyone is using the same words to ensure understanding across the enterprise.
It’s very easy to use the same lingo from project to project, but even more difficult to communicate the lingo across the enterprise unless a system is set up. The goal of an organization should be to create an understanding across all departments and divisions across the enterprise.
Inside Architecture believes that your goals should be:
All of this should be done before any type of software is built for your company. If consistent terms are not settled upon, your software will be a waste, and risk your future projects.
Red Hat has recently announced, detailed at this article at EWeek, that it will release its beta ability for its JBoss Enterprise Application Program in collaboration with Amazon EC2. This extends the existing relation Red Hat and Amazon have working together.
Craig Muzilla, the vice president of the middleware business unit for Red Hat, had this to say about the new ability of the software:
Java developers can develop an application and deploy it into the cloud without hardware or a data center, JBoss is a core application server with infrastructure, such as messaging and transaction management, for Java developers.
In a recent post by James McGovern at Enterprise Architecture: From Incite to Insight, he discusses the difficulties in aligning what your IT department understands with the priorities of your business, and how that could be difficult to do. In order for these two to function at their greatest capacities, IT and the businesses priorities must be matched to the company’s growth strategy. However, simply doing this doesn’t guarantee improvement.
McGovern also states that being aligned unless IT is held up to the standards of finishing their projects on time and on budget. To have the business and IT completely in sync, the Enterprise Architect must understand the difference between being aligned and being efficient, and hold the IT department to those standards.
Personal Effectiveness and Branding
This is very crucial in terms of saving time, and making sure that your effort is effective.
Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Leadership
No one can teach a person how to be innovative, an entrepreneur, or a leader…but you can certainly pick up some tips to help you out.
Sales and Marketing
You must be able to sell and pitch your ideas to the rest of the company, don’t rely on your technical skills to speak for itself.
Personal Relationships
Lastly, organizations are filled with people so that means that you must learn how to deal with them on a daily basis. People will often disagree with decisions; learning how to deal with them and different personalities will aid you with your day to day responsibilities.
There is plenty more out there to read, but this is just a start for architects to “think outside of the box”.
Business agility is something EA has struggled to enable. Sohel Aziz of Infosys Technologies has put up a great presentation on Slideshare where he discusses how integration of EA at the business level and maturity across dimensions will help drive business agility to new heights. Take the time to view this slideshow as I’m sure you’ll find it extremely valuable.
In a recent interview at SOA News, Brian Nally sat down with Rami Jammour to discuss what’s happening in the world of SOA. Nally asked what some of the emerging quality challenges for SOA were.
Nally responded with two things:
1) Environments are more and more heterogeneous, with many different faces and protocols
So, having said that given that situation, when you talk about quality you have to make sure that your business processes run on top of these heterogeneous environments need to be validated. You need to have a framework that is flexible enough to drive your process and drive your testing activities across these different heterogeneous environments.
2) People became more familiar with the processes, they began to look at the end processes.
So, they start to ask, what about my legacy applications, or the mainframes, or the green screen? They look more at what kind of framework can give them the flexibility so it can be extended to help them with all these specific needs that they have. Having a framework that is extensible and that can support some of the common things that people do is becoming more and more critical.
What do you personally seee as the emerging challenges for SOA?
Yesterday, I posted on how architects must have a business oriented approach when first creating frameworks for enterprise architecture. Similarly today, I found a post from Inside Architecture that sums of the business function of EA by explaining these 3 segments
There was even an image in the post of the process flow of enterprise architecture which include business groups, business leaders, process management, IT Dept, and stakeholders. It’s a good visual for yesterday’s point that architects must coordinate with different business concepts in order to make enterprise architecture valuable. Click on it to see it full-sized.
Adrian Grigoriu makes a good point in his latest post on ITtoolbox. Most Enterprise Architecture frameworks currently out there are strictly IT-focused; thus it is ignoring business views that are valuable. Business will have to work on this approach, to ensure it selects the right enterprise architects that have IT solution experience, rather than only IT skills.
In a recent post at IT Business Edge, they ask four questions of your EA administrator to help determine if the enterprise architect is effectively doing their job.
1) Do people understand you?
2) Do people see you?
3) Do you understand the business and how technology – even so-called technology ‘best practices” — can limit it?
4) If you know how your business and IT systems compare to others – via benchmarks – do you know why?
In order for Enterprise Architecture to work, people have to know who you are and understand the processes you’re taking. As stated in the article, if you’ve said no to any of the questions, something about your EA processes aren’t working.
With Enterprise Architecture, it’s important that there is a base that defines how business information is stored, so no matter what time it is where you are, the information is available to everyone else who is not in your time zone. They discuss this in a recent post at User-Centric Enterprise Architecture.
Four things are necessary for your information to be able to run on a 24 hour clock and accessible to all employees throughout the world:
There are so many benefits to implementing enterprise architecture into a business. I found this video at YouTube, which explained the importance of Enterprise Architecture throughout various forms of the government, from local to national levels of the government.
According to the video, the benefits of implementing enterprise architecture are:
- It saves money
- Eliminates unwanted redundancies
- Improves services
The reason the government is having a hard time adopting to the EA system is because in the 1930s, when all of the different branches of the government came about, they created software to fit their personal needs, neglecting to adopt to the fact that they may have had to collaborate with other agencies in the future.
Now there is a need to establish a standard, to create a common architecture that will easily connect the information used throughout the local, state, and national government agencies.
So what are the benefits of the governments working together both for themselves and working in between each other?
-Who they are
-Who they communicate with
-Where they want to go
-What resources they need to get there
-How they will work together to manage change
