EnterpriseArchitecture.co.uk

There is a bewildering array of Enterprise Architecture methodologies so it will be of great interest to me to find out which one people are actually using, if at all.

So to find out, I have put together a pick poll so please take the two minutes and leave your choice.

You get a chance to select up to 3 options because I suspect that people are using a combination of more than once approach, rather than following one prescriptively.

This is purely for interest purposes, I’m not going to use this data for marketing. I’m also sure it’s not particularly scientific but it is chance for you to express your opinion.

The poll is here on the EnterpriseArchitecture.co.uk forum.

written by Dave Oliver

I have this belief that understanding how to manage time is an essential task of Enterprise Architecture but oddly this is a principle that isn’t spoken about much, if at all. Oddly some Enterprise Architecture software tools only seem to provide time management tools for software support life cycles. Hence a previous post that went in some way to start the debate with a mindmap to capture and categorise the elements that Enterprise Architecture would be interested in.

After reviewing this mindmap it became apparent to me that allot of data has a life. Take for example financially data, it has to be kept for x number of years then archived and/or deleted.

If it is lucky enough to get archived the data format that it is held in is going to get old and as technology moves on at a pace we soon won’t have the equipment available to read it. But who cares about old data? Well actually as any historian will tells you, everyone should! Data held in electronic formats is the equivalent of ledgers and manuals written out by hand, printed or typed in previous times that provided a valuable history allowing reviews to re-examine what was going on so lessons could be learnt and history, in effect, didn’t have the opportunity of repeat itself as previous mistakes made could be avoided in future.

Take for example the current ‘Credit Crunch’, could we better understand more about the lead up to previous economic down-turns if we had access to more data from those times than just the summaries and analysis performed at the time without the benefit of using the knowledge and tools we have now? Yes, this way we could put in better economic markers allowing a greater degree of fine-tuning and less likely to lose large amounts of money on a bad idea constantly hidden, because it take such a long time to reveal itself and kicking us up the butt.

So old electronic data siting on a tape real or floppy disk in a store-cupboard is a waste as it provides insight into your organisations history, how did it get to where it got to today? What mistakes did it make? What did it do very right? All this information is more than just useful to historians but can actually become a handy revenue stream as Analysis companies will pay good money to write case-studies and books about what your organisation did right which they can package up and sell that doesn’t do your business reputation any harm whatsoever, all helping the share-price. Also allows you to discover if faltering area of your business every did work right allowing you to play back to when it started going wrong. Also when mistakes are made with more access to more data won’t it be easier to spot trends?

With data storage being so ridiculously cheap it could be well worth dusting off that old media and loading and transforming it into something that can be used. Yes, this all will take time and where exactly is the ROI? Well, I think this will actually be an easy sell as many friends that work in finance have spoke to me that they wished they still had access to old data, so I don’t think this will be a hard fight.

I believe that data should never be deleted and if it is archived will then it should be into systems where it can easily be retrieved that are kept up to date, invested in and brought forward.

The fly in the ointment is software vendors and their constant games to provide some kind of lock-in or incentive to upgrade. These tactics will effect the ability to retrieve historical data so we must look to either taking matters into our own hands and transforming data to vendor neutral data formats or avoid software vendors that use proprietary data formats all-together. We need to pick our vendors wisely and put format neutrality into our ‘must-have’ requirements rather than ‘nice-to-have’.

When you think about this, it is a serious issue, an elephant in the room that no-one sees.

written by Dave Oliver \\ tags: Data & Information

Eric Roch has written a no-nonsense-common-sense article on How to use ESBs for SOA that is well worth a read. I found myself very much agreeing with the simple list of principles he suggests, and they are,

• Keep business logic out of the ESB layer
• Implement well defined integration patterns in the ESB such as message transformation and routing
• Expose standards based interfaces from the ESB wrapping proprietary interfaces with web services or JMS interfaces
• Transform proprietary message formats to common business objects and hide proprietary interface behaviour

written by Dave Oliver \\ tags: Data & Information

Many Enterprise Architecture methodologies talk about the management of time but I haven’t found one that tells you how to do to that. For a practice that is about understanding the now and the step to achieving the to be, I find this an amazing oversight.

Anyway, so what I decided to do was to have a go at capturing all the relevant timing information that an Enterprise Architect would be interested in. Hence the attached Mindmap, which you can click into.

If you prefer you can come and join in the discussion on the EnterpriseArchitect.co.uk Forum.

Technorati Profile

written by Dave Oliver \\ tags: Enterprise Architecture Practice

Blogs are about discussions but often are very one-sided, so I’ve decided to do something about that!

I’ve created a forum so we can have a proper conversation.

http://enterprisearchitecture.co.uk/forum/

written by Dave Oliver

Paul Homan recently commented on Green EA which set my mind thinking … ‘being more Green’ is a strategic ambition and what is the process and practice for generating strategic change? Enterprise Architecture! When EA’s are struggling to find some ROI reason to justify their existence in the economic down-turn amazingly one of the main ROI reasons is one of the biggest issues of our time as the ‘Return’ doesn’t literally mean monetary and also doesn’t necessarily mean more? … it can also mean less, as in less carbon release, less waste produced and less energy used.

Often companies are looking for quick, hand-to-mouth change to make an immediate impact but often these changes are to radical or not radical enough, either way will need draconian measures to keep them in effect. Good strategic change happens in steps and not sweeps.

A good example is the profile of electricity consumption throughout the day. As you can see from the graph of total electricity generated in the UK in MW over half hour periods taken from today’s Elexon’s BMReports website yesterdays power consumption profile is similar to today’s. 

Much of the electricity is generated by coal and gas power-stations, by reducing the amount of electricity generated by these power-stations is the goal.

The two pronged attack is,

1) Reduce the overall demand for electricity

2) Replace whole or inpart the electricity generated by coal and gas power-stations with generation methods that do not give off large amounts of green-house gases.

I should say that many would like to take this go a step further and use generation methods than have little environmental impact such as wind, wave, solar and thermal to name but a few. I personally love this but am aware that to get here a lot more research and investment from everyone is required.

Whilst I’m on the subject we may as well talk about nuclear. Here in the UK we have had a good safety record with nuclear mainly due to the very British safety obsessive attitude brought about by culture. Nuclear cannot ramp up or ramp down in energy production as fast as coal or gas so is used for the large volume sustained underlying amounts of energy which is called the Base-load. The idea in the UK is to reduce the amount of Base-load produced by Gas and Coal and replace it with nuclear.

My very personal view is that I am happy about this as long as nuclear itself is a medium term answer and will itself be replaced by other forms when they are suitably advanced enough and man enough for the job. So whether you believe in global warming or not it does make common sense to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to improve air-quality and it does make sense to reduce the amount of electricity we consume. These are noble ambitions no matter your political stance.

Anyway we haven’t strayed away from the point, just merely demonstrated it. Good strategy comes from providing goals and coming up with board solutions which launches initiatives, then programmes of work, then projects. All the time testing whether things are right and have the strength to stop them when they are wrong, even testing whether the strategy is right. However the basic misnomer is that strategy is a plan.

So can you imagine the chaos if the Government decided to solve the problem by rationing electricity? Ok so this wouldn’t happen because Government understands the criticality and how much is dependent on electricity, the steer is that it is obvious how much electricity is relied upon. We as Enterprise Architects could learn many lessons then successfully communicate them about what is the critically of things purely by understanding what is dependent on them.

The challenge is that Enterprise Architects really do need to become the green champions of our organisations by understanding what is consumed and wasted, then working with the business to decided on goals then formulate strategies and place in measures and governance to ensure these strategies and tested and the goals met. We are after all ideally placed to take on this responsibility so we shouldn’t hide from it.

So here is my challenge to all Architects that have blogs, write about going green as we need to spread the message that solving these problems is everyone’s responsibility.

written by Dave Oliver

John Wu is a good guy. Out of respect for Fenix Theuerkorn and his work on Lightweight Enterprise Architecture, John has decided to rename his EA Methodology from LiteEA To Coherent EA.

Coherent EA is a actually a better, more descriptive name for John’s work IMHO and as a regular contributor to the ITToolbox conversations his methodology has the benefit of faster development from genuine experience than most of the others I could mention.

I certainly have benefited from Coherent EA in the past and think that it is a great resource, so I for one will be updating my book-marks.

written by Dave Oliver \\ tags: Coherent EA, ITToolbox, John Wu

A warm welcome to EnterpriseArchitecture.co.uk!

My name is David Oliver and I am an Enterprise Architect for a well known FTSE 100 (please forgive me if I don’t name-drop).

I have owned this URL for sometime but haven’t done much with it other than point it at my other blog which is part of the GeeksWithBlogs community. However, I have decided to rent a little webspace and grow it into a useful resource on Enterprise Architecture and related topics. Basically to do this URL some justice!

My intention is to keep this resource free, I am may have a little advertising to cover some of my costs but the whole point is to share. Why? Well I’m a relative newcomer to the Enterprise Architecture game as I’ve only held the position for a year so I’m learning. I have been in IT however for twenty years so I also feel I have something to give. I do not wish to profit from this venture I just wish to purely profit from this by picking up advice and experience.

Soon I will have a, Forum, Wiki and regular Polls running on this site so you can learn, share and find out what’s popular and useful and what’s not!

This resource is as much for you as it is for me so I would like to invite other Enterprise Architects to come and join me here, not only in the resources provided but I would like to start interviewing for other bloggers to come and blog also under this great URL.

Also as a free service to fellow Enterprise Architect’s I’m offering a free email forwarding service so your emails addresses can have a more professional sounding address than Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo. So just email me at Dave [at] EnterpriseArchitecture.co.uk with your name and your email address you would like your mail to be forwarded to and abit about yourself. The service is free and confidential. However it is an unsupported service and a spam filter is applied so the service comes with no delivery guarantees. So why do it? Well, it is great way for me to get to know other EA’s as I know you are shy beasts so it’s offering a carrot to come and say hi!

Best Regards,

David Oliver

written by Dave Oliver

The Open Group has recently released a draft version of a SOA ontology.

The Open Group has always had a mandate to help boundaryless information flow and the ontology (specification of conceptualisation) for SOA is a demonstration of just that. The ontology is written in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) defined by the World-Wide Web
Consortium and this for me is what makes it a hurdle to learn as it’s not an intuitive meta-language but then is any? Perhaps if it wasn’t for the graphical tools we would get stuck.

Open Group explains the benefits as:

1. It defines the concepts, terminology and semantics of SOA in both business and technical
terms, in order to:

• Create a foundation for further work in domain-specific areas,
• Enable communications between business and technical people,
• Enhance the understanding of SOA concepts in the business and technical
  communities, and
• Provide a means to state problems and opportunities clearly and unambiguously
  to promote mutual understanding.

2. It potentially contributes to model-driven SOA implementation. The ontology is designed for use by:

• Business people, to give them a deeper understanding of SOA, and its use in the
  enterprise;
• Architects, as metadata for architectural artifacts; and
• Architecture methodologists, as a component of SOA metamodels.

The full draft can be found here:

http://www.opengroup.org/projects/soa-ontology/doc.tpl?gdid=16940

After reviewing the draft I am left cold. My first opinion is that business will find this difficult to adopt in the same way they found UML difficult. Why because they are both coding languages, you may as well stick in a ‘Print’ command. The gap between logical design and executing code is a large as ever.

I still hold the belief that business and IT can only really align on the logical level. Business doesn’t want to know about detail they will want to be abstracted away from that, this is actually a key SOA deliverable, just a very unspoken one, hence why REST services appeal. I believe that IT cannot handle business logic detail on it’s own, so alignment between business and IT will come when hybrid groups formed of technologically minded users and business oriented IT exist to make, maintain and specialise in services that support their business area based on IT standards and underlying IT technologies and services.

Why I believe these groups need to exist is because business and IT can never align because they have very different goals and therefore different headings. Align the destination and the groups will align, not possible with business and IT as they are very different by reson d’etre. You can’t marry creatures of different species. You can however translate and interface.

These groups do actually exist all over successful organisations they just lack boundary, form and recognition perhaps even by the very people that make them up. E.g. So you code in a Spreadsheet? So do you report to the Sales-Manager or Dev Team Leader?

Back to the Ontology, I think the Open Group need to ask a fundamental question, how does business see and understand logic? I really do think we need to revisit DSL’s.

written by Dave Oliver \\ tags: Open Group, SOA

Job titles are often effortless in their descriptiveness. Project Manager, Business Analyst, System Tester and .Net Developer are good examples because the subject is concise and the predicate modifies successfully, all meaning some semblance of what a person does can be derived from it.

However with ‘Enterprise Architecture’ and ‘Enterprise Architect’ it’s not entirely obvious what the position is and what someone holding that position does, inevitably leading to the need for further description which predictably stumbles into the second problem, the woefully dire and contrasting descriptions of that we do that litter almost every Enterprise Architecture methodology and practitioners blog. No wonder the meaning is different from organisation to organisation and therefore what an Enterprise Architect does (or doesn’t) and get involved in. Inconclusion the Enterprise Architect is hindered from the get-go.

So what are the solution options?

1) Educate everyone on Enterprise Architecture – Many are hoping that time and tide will eventually solve this one but without a united vision I fear that this is little more than a hope.

2) Break-up Enterprise Architecture into it’s constituent parts and give each one an individual role – More realistic as this ensure that the activities under Enterprise Architecture have individual focus and therefore are likely to happen rather than get lost, diluted or ignored.

What do you think?

written by Dave Oliver