Tag Archives: EA

by | May 14, 2013 · 10:45 AM

The Open Group Sydney – My Conference Highlights

By Mac Lemon, MD Australia at Enterprise Architects

Sydney

Well the dust has settled now with the conclusion of The Open Group ‘Enterprise Transformation’ Conference held in Sydney, Australia for the first time on April 15-20. Enterprise Architects is proud to have been recognised at the event by The Open Group as being pivotal in the success of this event. A number of our clients including NBN, Australia Post, QGC, RIO and Westpac presented excellent papers on leading edge approaches in strategy and architecture and a number of EA’s own thought leaders in Craig Martin, Christine Stephenson and Ana Kukec also delivered widely acclaimed papers.

Attendance at the conference was impressive and demonstrated that there is substantial appetite for a dedicated event focussed on the challenges of business and technology strategy and architecture. We saw many international visitors both as delegates and presenting papers and there is no question that a 2014 Open Group Forum will be the stand out event in the calendar for business and technology strategy and architecture professionals.

My top 10 take-outs from the conference include the following:

  1. The universal maturing in understanding the criticality of Business Architecture and the total convergence upon Business Capability Modelling as a cornerstone of business architecture;
  2. The improving appreciation of techniques for understanding and expressing business strategy and motivation, such as strategy maps, business model canvass and business motivation modelling;
  3. That customer experience is emerging as a common driver for many transformation initiatives;
  4. While the process for establishing the case and roadmap for transformation appears well enough understood, the process for management of the blueprint through transformation is not and generally remains a major program risk;
  5. Then next version of TOGAF® should offer material uplift in support for security architecture which otherwise remains at low levels of maturity from a framework standardisation perspective;
  6. ArchiMate® is generating real interest as a preferred enterprise architecture modelling notation – and that stronger alignment of ArchiMate® and TOGAF® meta models in then next version of TOGAF® is highly anticipated;
  7. There is industry demand for recognised certification of architects to demonstrate learning alongside experience as the mark of a good architect. There remains an unsatisfied requirement for certification that falls in the gap between TOGAF® and the Open CA certification;
  8. Australia can be proud of its position in having the second highest per capita TOGAF® certification globally behind the Netherlands;
  9. While the topic of interoperability in government revealed many battle scarred veterans convinced of the hopelessness of the cause – there remain an equal number of campaigners willing to tackle the challenge and their free and frank exchange of views was entertaining enough to justify worth the price of a conference ticket;
  10. Unashamedly – Enterprise Architects remains in a league of its own in the concentration of strategy and architecture thought leadership in Australia – if not globally.

Mac LemonMac Lemon is the Managing Director of Enterprise Architects Pty Ltd and is based in Melbourne, Australia.

This is an extract from Mac’s recent blog post on the Enterprise Architects web site which you can view here.

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by | May 9, 2013 · 7:34 AM

Corso Introduces Roadmapping Support for TOGAF® 9 in its Strategic Planning Platform

By Martin Owen, CEO, Corso

Last week, we announced new roadmapping support for TOGAF® in IBM Rational System Architect®, a leading Enterprise Architecture and modeling software.

The new TOGAF extension supports the modeling, migration and implementation of an Enterprise Architecture within Corso’s Strategic Planning Platform, which integrates Enterprise Architecture, IT planning and strategic planning into a single, comprehensive solution. The new TOGAF extension provides capabilities in managing current and future state architectures, work packages and timelines/lifecycles /heatmaps—key areas for successful roadmapping and transition planning.

Corso now offers roadmapping solutions for both ArchiMate® 2.0 and TOGAF as part of its Strategic Planning Platform. Both solutions are available as SaaS option, on-premise or standard perpetual license solution. A roadmapping datasheet and white paper are available.

Roadmapping is critical for building change-tolerant Enterprise Architectures that accurately describe and manage strategic business transformations. Our new solution gives Enterprise Architects the tools within TOGAF to more quickly map out a transition plan with deliverables for the organization. By tying plans to the business strategy, the architects can drive a faster development and implementation lifecycle.

Our new TOGAF solution offers these key capabilities:

  • Automatic generation of timeline diagrams with milestones and dimensions.
  • Work package definitions and resources so users can group and track specific actions.
  • Heat maps that display a visual map of the state of the business and IT infrastructure and highlight cost overruns.
  • Improved gap analysis through enhanced support for plateaus and gaps.
  • Roadmap reports that enable users to see the current and future states of the architecture and work packages.
  • Integration with IBM Rational Focal Point® so that work packages and milestones can be used in portfolio management and prioritization initiatives.
  • Lifecycle support for standard states such as application portfolio management.

Corso’s Strategic Planning Platform is a comprehensive solution that integrates Enterprise Architecture, IT and strategic planning into a fully charged change process that uses cloud technology to elevate decision-making to a strategic level. This approach unites business and architecture views into one central platform and leverages existing tools and the Web to share information and decision-making across various teams within the organization. For more information about Corso and its roadmapping solutions, visit http://www.corso.co.uk.

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Martin Owen, CEO, Corso has spent over 20 years in Enterprise Architecture and is a co-author of the original Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) standard. Martin has run teams driving the product directions, strategies and roadmaps for the Enterprise Architecture tools at IBM.

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by | March 1, 2013 · 2:04 PM

Complexity from Big Data and Cloud Trends Makes Architecture Tools like ArchiMate and TOGAF More Powerful, Says Expert Panel

By Dana Gardner, Interarbor Solutions

Listen to the recorded podcast here: Complexity from Big Data and Cloud Trends Makes Architecture Tools like ArchiMate and TOGAF More Powerful, Says Expert Panel, or read the transcript here.

We recently assembled a panel of Enterprise Architecture (EA) experts to explain how such simultaneous and complex trends as big data, Cloud Computing, security, and overall IT transformation can be helped by the combined strengths of The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF®) and the ArchiMate® modeling language.

The panel consisted of Chris Forde, General Manager for Asia-Pacific and Vice President of Enterprise Architecture at The Open Group; Iver Band, Vice Chair of The Open Group ArchiMate Forum and Enterprise Architect at The Standard, a diversified financial services company; Mike Walker, Senior Enterprise Architecture Adviser and Strategist at HP and former Director of Enterprise Architecture at Dell; Henry Franken, the Chairman of The Open Group ArchiMate Forum and Managing Director at BIZZdesign, and Dave Hornford, Chairman of the Architecture Forum at The Open Group and Managing Partner at Conexiam. I served as the moderator.

This special BriefingsDirect thought leadership interview series comes to you in conjunction with The Open Group Conference recently held in Newport Beach, California. The conference focused on “Big Data – he transformation we need to embrace today.” [Disclosure: The Open Group and HP are sponsors ofBriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Is there something about the role of the enterprise architect that is shifting?

Walker: There is less of a focus on the traditional things we come to think of EA such as standards, governance and policies, but rather into emerging areas such as the soft skills, Business Architecture, and strategy.

To this end I see a lot in the realm of working directly with the executive chain to understand the key value drivers for the company and rationalize where they want to go with their business. So we’re moving into a business-transformation role in this practice.

At the same time, we’ve got to be mindful of the disruptive external technology forces coming in as well. EA can’t just divorce from the other aspects of architecture as well. So the role that enterprise architects play becomes more and more important and elevated in the organization.

Two examples of this disruptive technology that are being focused on at the conference are Big Data and Cloud Computing. Both are providing impacts to our businesses not because of some new business idea but because technology is available to enhance or provide new capabilities to our business. The EA’s still do have to understand these new technology innovations and determine how they will apply to the business.

We need to get really good enterprise architects, it’s difficult to find good ones. There is a shortage right now especially given that a lot of focus is being put on the EA department to really deliver sound architectures.

Not standalone

Gardner: We’ve been talking a lot here about Big Data, but usually that’s not just a standalone topic. It’s Big Data and Cloud, Cloud, mobile and security.

So with these overlapping and complex relationships among multiple trends, why is EA and things like the TOGAF framework and the ArchiMate modeling language especially useful?

Band: One of the things that has been clear for a while now is that people outside of IT don’t necessarily have to go through the technology function to avail themselves of these technologies any more. Whether they ever had to is really a question as well.

One of things that EA is doing, and especially in the practice that I work in, is using approaches like the ArchiMate modeling language to effect clear communication between the business, IT, partners and other stakeholders. That’s what I do in my daily work, overseeing our major systems modernization efforts. I work with major partners, some of which are offshore.

I’m increasingly called upon to make sure that we have clear processes for making decisions and clear ways of visualizing the different choices in front of us. We can’t always unilaterally dictate the choice, but we can make the conversation clearer by using frameworks like the TOGAF standard and the ArchiMate modeling language, which I use virtually every day in my work.

Hornford: The fundamental benefit of these tools is the organization realizing its capability and strategy. I just came from a session where a fellow quoted a Harvard study, which said that around a third of executives thought their company was good at executing on its strategy. He highlighted that this means that two-thirds are not good at executing on their strategy.

If you’re not good at executing on your strategy and you’ve got Big Data, mobile, consumerization of IT and Cloud, where are you going? What’s the correct approach? How does this fit into what you were trying to accomplish as an enterprise?

An enterprise architect that is doing their job is bringing together the strategy, goals and objectives of the organization. Also, its capabilities with the techniques that are available, whether it’s offshoring, onshoring, Cloud, or Big Data, so that the organization is able to move forward to where it needs to be, as opposed to where it’s going to randomly walk to.

Forde: One of the things that has come out in several of the presentations is this kind of capability-based planning, a technique in EA to get their arms around this thing from a business-driver perspective. Just to polish what Dave said a little bit, it’s connecting all of those things. We see enterprises talking about a capability-based view of things on that basis.

Gardner: Let’s get a quick update. The TOGAF framework, where are we and what have been the highlights from this particular event?

Minor upgrade

Hornford: In the last year, we’ve published a minor upgrade for TOGAF version 9.1 which was based upon cleaning up consistency in the language in the TOGAF documentation. What we’re working on right now is a significant new release, the next release of the TOGAF standard, which is dividing the TOGAF documentation to make it more consumable, more consistent and more useful for someone.

Today, the TOGAF standard has guidance on how to do something mixed into the framework of what you should be doing. We’re peeling those apart. So with that peeled apart, we won’t have guidance that is tied to classic application architecture in a world of Cloud.

What we find when we have done work with the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) for banking architecture, Sherwood Applied Business Security Architecture (SABSA) for security architecture, and the TeleManagement Forum, is that the concepts in the TOGAF framework work across industries and across trends. We need to move the guidance into a place so that we can be far nimbler on how to tie Cloud with my current strategy, how to tie consumerization of IT with on-shoring?

Franken: The ArchiMate modeling language turned two last year, and the ArchiMate 1.0 standard is the language to model out the core of your EA. The ArchiMate 2.0 standard added two specifics to it to make it better aligned also to the process of EA.

According to the TOGAF standard, this is being able to model out the motivation, why you’re doing EA, stakeholders and the goals that drive us. The second extension to the ArchiMate standard is being able to model out its planning and migration.

So with the core EA and these two extensions, together with the TOGAF standard process working, you have a good basis on getting EA to work in your organization.

Gardner: Mike, fill us in on some of your thoughts about the role of information architecture vis-à-vis the larger business architect and enterprise architect roles.

Walker: Information architecture is an interesting topic in that it hasn’t been getting a whole lot of attention until recently.

Information architecture is an aspect of Enterprise Architecture that enables an information strategy or business solution through the definition of the company’s business information assets, their sources, structure, classification and associations that will prescribe the required application architecture and technical capabilities.

Information architecture is the bridge between the Business Architecture world and the application and technology architecture activities.

The reason I say that is because information architecture is a business-driven discipline that details the information strategy of the company. As we know, and from what we’ve heard at the conference keynotes like in the case of NASA, Big Data, and security presentations, the preservation and classification of that information is vital to understanding what your architecture should be.

Least matured

From an industry perspective, this is one of the least matured, as far as being incorporated into a formal discipline. The TOGAF standard actually has a phase dedicated to it in data architecture. Again, there are still lots of opportunities to grow and incorporate additional methods, models and tools by the enterprise information management discipline.

Enterprise information management not only it captures traditional topic areas like master data management (MDM), metadata and unstructured types of information architecture but also focusing on the information governance, and the architecture patterns and styles implemented in MDM, Big Data, etc. There is a great deal of opportunity there.

From the role of information architects, I’m seeing more and more traction in the industry as a whole. I’ve dealt with an entire group that’s focused on information architecture and building up an enterprise information management practice, so that we can take our top line business strategies and understand what architectures we need to put there.

This is a critical enabler for global companies, because oftentimes they’re restricted by regulation, typically handled at a government or regional area. This means we have to understand that we build our architecture. So it’s not about the application, but rather the data that it processes, moves, or transforms.

Gardner: Up until not too long ago, the conventional thinking was that applications generate data. Then you treat the data in some way so that it can be used, perhaps by other applications, but that the data was secondary to the application.

But there’s some shift in that thinking now more toward the idea that the data is the application and that new applications are designed to actually expand on the data’s value and deliver it out to mobile tiers perhaps. Does that follow in your thinking that the data is actually more prominent as a resource perhaps on par with applications?

Walker: You’re spot on, Dana. Before the commoditization of these technologies that resided on premises, we could get away with starting at the application layer and work our way back because we had access to the source code or hardware behind our firewalls. We could throw servers out, and we used to put the firewalls in front of the data to solve the problem with infrastructure. So we didn’t have to treat information as a first-class citizen. Times have changed, though.

Information access and processing is now democratized and it’s being pushed as the first point of presentment. A lot of times this is on a mobile device and even then it’s not the corporate’s mobile device, but your personal device. So how do you handle that data?

It’s the same way with Cloud, and I’ll give you a great example of this. I was working as an adviser for a company, and they were looking at their Cloud strategy. They had made a big bet on one of the big infrastructures and Cloud-service providers. They looked first at what the features and functions that that Cloud provider could provide, and not necessarily the information requirements. There were two major issues that they ran into, and that was essentially a showstopper. They had to pull off that infrastructure.

The first one was that in that specific Cloud provider’s terms of service around intellectual property (IP) ownership. Essentially, that company was forced to cut off their IP rights.

Big business

As you know, IP is a big business these days, and so that was a showstopper. It actually broke the core regulatory laws around being able to discover information.

So focusing on the applications to make sure it meets your functional needs is important. However, we should take a step back and look at the information first and make sure that for the people in your organization who can’t say no, their requirements are satisfied.

Gardner: Data architecture is it different from EA and Business Architecture, or is it a subset? What’s the relationship, Dave?

Hornford: Data architecture is part of an EA. I won’t use the word subset, because a subset starts to imply that it is a distinct thing that you can look at on its own. You cannot look at your Business Architecture without understanding your information architecture. When you think about Big Data, cool. We’ve got this pile of data in the corner. Where did it come from? Can we use it? Do we actually have legitimate rights, as Mike highlighted, to use this information? Are we allowed to mix it and who mixes it?

When we look at how our business is optimized, they normally optimize around work product, what the organization is delivering. That’s very easy. You can see who consumes your work product. With information, you often have no idea who consumes your information. So now we have provenance, we have source and as we move for global companies, we have the trends around consumerization, Cloud and simply tightening cycle time.

Gardner: Of course, the end game for a lot of the practitioners here is to create that feedback loop of a lifecycle approach, rapid information injection and rapid analysis that could be applied. So what are some of the ways that these disciplines and tools can help foster that complete lifecycle?

Band: The disciplines and tools can facilitate the right conversations among different stakeholders. One of the things that we’re doing at The Standard is building cadres equally balanced between people in business and IT.

We’re training them in information management, going through a particular curriculum, and having them study for an information management certification that introduces a lot of these different frameworks and standard concepts.

Creating cadres

We want to create these cadres to be able to solve tough and persistent information management problems that affect all companies in financial services, because information is a shared asset. The purpose of the frameworks is to ensure proper stewardship of that asset across disciplines and across organizations within an enterprise.

Hornford: The core is from the two standards that we have, the ArchiMate standard and the TOGAF standard. The TOGAF standard has, from its early roots, focused on the components of EA and how to build a consistent method of understanding of what I’m trying to accomplish, understanding where I am, and where I need to be to reach my goal.

When we bring in the ArchiMate standard, I have a language, a descriptor, a visual descriptor that allows me to cross all of those domains in a consistent description, so that I can do that traceability. When I pull in this lever or I have this regulatory impact, what does it hit me with, or if I have this constraint, what does it hit me with?

If I don’t do this, if I don’t use the framework of the TOGAF standard, or I don’t use the discipline of formal modeling in the ArchiMate standard, we’re going to do it anecdotally. We’re going to trip. We’re going to fall. We’re going to have a non-ending series of surprises, as Mike highlighted.

“Oh, terms of service. I am violating the regulations. Beautiful. Let’s take that to our executive and tell him right as we are about to go live that we have to stop, because we can’t get where we want to go, because we didn’t think about what it took to get there.” And that’s the core of EA in the frameworks.

Walker: To build on what Dave has just talked about and going back to your first question Dana, the value statement on TOGAF from a business perspective. The businesses value of TOGAF is that they get a repeatable and a predictable process for building out our architectures that properly manage risks and reliably produces value.

The TOGAF framework provides a methodology to ask what problems you’re trying to solve and where you are trying to go with your business opportunities or challenges. That leads to Business Architecture, which is really a rationalization in technical or architectural terms the distillation of the corporate strategy.

From there, what you want to understand is information — how does that translate, what information architecture do we need to put in place? You get into all sorts of things around risk management, etc., and then it goes on from there, until what we were talking about earlier about information architecture.

If the TOGAF standard is applied properly you can achieve the same result every time, That is what interests business stakeholders in my opinion. And the ArchiMate modeling language is great because, as we talked about, it provides very rich visualizations so that people cannot only show a picture, but tie information together. Different from other aspects of architecture, information architecture is less about the boxes and more about the lines.

Quality of the individuals

Forde: Building on what Dave was saying earlier and also what Iver was saying is that while the process and the methodology and the tools are of interest, it’s the discipline and the quality of the individuals doing the work

Iver talked about how the conversation is shifting and the practice is improving to build communications groups that have a discipline to operate around. What I am hearing is implied, but actually I know what specifically occurs, is that we end up with assets that are well described and reusable.

And there is a point at which you reach a critical mass that these assets become an accelerator for decision making. So the ability of the enterprise and the decision makers in the enterprise at the right level to respond is improved, because they have a well disciplined foundation beneath them.

A set of assets that are reasonably well-known at the right level of granularity for them to absorb the information and the conversation is being structured so that the technical people and the business people are in the right room together to talk about the problems.

This is actually a fairly sophisticated set of operations that I am discussing and doesn’t happen overnight, but is definitely one of the things that we see occurring with our members in certain cases.

Hornford: I want to build on that what Chris said. It’s actually the word “asset.” While he was talking, I was thinking about how people have talked about information as an asset. Most of us don’t know what information we have, how it’s collected, where it is, but we know we have got a valuable asset.

I’ll use an analogy. I have a factory some place in the world that makes stuff. Is that an asset? If I know that my factory is able to produce a particular set of goods and it’s hooked into my supply chain here, I’ve got an asset. Before that, I just owned a thing.

I was very encouraged listening to what Iver talked about. We’re building cadres. We’re building out this approach and I have seen this. I’m not using that word, but now I’m stealing that word. It’s how people build effective teams, which is not to take a couple of specialists and put them in an ivory tower, but it’s to provide the method and the discipline of how we converse about it, so that we can have a consistent conversation.

When I tie it with some of the tools from the Architecture Forum and the ArchiMate Forum, I’m able to consistently describe it, so that I now have an asset I can identify, consume and produce value from.

Business context

Forde: And this is very different from data modeling. We are not talking about entity relationship, junk at the technical detail, or third normal form and that kind of stuff. We’re talking about a conversation that’s occurring around the business context of what needs to go on supported by the right level of technical detail when you need to go there in order to clarify.

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by | January 2, 2013 · 5:00 AM

2013 Open Group Predictions, Vol. 1

By The Open Group

A big thank you to all of our members and staff who have made 2012 another great year for The Open Group. There were many notable achievements this year, including the release of ArchiMate 2.0, the launch of the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE™) Technical Standard and the publication of the SOA Reference Architecture (SOA RA) and the Service-Oriented Cloud Computing Infrastructure Framework (SOCCI).

As we wrap up 2012, we couldn’t help but look towards what is to come in 2013 for The Open Group and the industries we‘re a part of. Without further ado, here they are:

Big Data
By Dave Lounsbury, Chief Technical Officer

Big Data is on top of everyone’s mind these days. Consumerization, mobile smart devices, and expanding retail and sensor networks are generating massive amounts of data on behavior, environment, location, buying patterns – etc. – producing what is being called “Big Data”. In addition, as the use of personal devices and social networks continue to gain popularity so does the expectation to have access to such data and the computational power to use it anytime, anywhere. Organizations will turn to IT to restructure its services so it meets the growing expectation of control and access to data.

Organizations must embrace Big Data to drive their decision-making and to provide the optimal service mix services to customers. Big Data is becoming so big that the big challenge is how to use it to make timely decisions. IT naturally focuses on collecting data so Big Data itself is not an issue.. To allow humans to keep on top of this flood of data, industry will need to move away from programming computers for storing and processing data to teaching computers how to assess large amounts of uncorrelated data and draw inferences from this data on their own. We also need to start thinking about the skills that people need in the IT world to not only handle Big Data, but to make it actionable. Do we need “Data Architects” and if so, what would their role be?

In 2013, we will see the beginning of the Intellectual Computing era. IT will play an essential role in this new era and will need to help enterprises look at uncorrelated data to find the answer.

Security

By Jim Hietala, Vice President of Security

As 2012 comes to a close, some of the big developments in security over the past year include:

  • Continuation of hacktivism attacks.
  • Increase of significant and persistent threats targeting government and large enterprises. The notable U.S. National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace started to make progress in the second half of the year in terms of industry and government movement to address fundamental security issues.
  • Security breaches were discovered by third parties, where the organizations affected had no idea that they were breached. Data from the 2012 Verizon report suggests that 92 percent of companies breached were notified by a third party.
  • Acknowledgement from senior U.S. cybersecurity professionals that organizations fall into two groups: those that know they’ve been penetrated, and those that have been penetrated, but don’t yet know it.

In 2013, we’ll no doubt see more of the same on the attack front, plus increased focus on mobile attack vectors. We’ll also see more focus on detective security controls, reflecting greater awareness of the threat and on the reality that many large organizations have already been penetrated, and therefore responding appropriately requires far more attention on detection and incident response.

We’ll also likely see the U.S. move forward with cybersecurity guidance from the executive branch, in the form of a Presidential directive. New national cybersecurity legislation seemed to come close to happening in 2012, and when it failed to become a reality, there were many indications that the administration would make something happen by executive order.

Enterprise Architecture

By Leonard Fehskens, Vice President of Skills and Capabilities

Preparatory to my looking back at 2012 and forward to 2013, I reviewed what I wrote last year about 2011 and 2012.

Probably the most significant thing from my perspective is that so little has changed. In fact, I think in many respects the confusion about what Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Business Architecture are about has gotten worse.

The stress within the EA community as both the demands being placed on it and the diversity of opinion within it increase continues to grow.  This year, I saw a lot more concern about the value proposition for EA, but not a lot of (read “almost no”) convergence on what that value proposition is.

Last year I wrote “As I expected at this time last year, the conventional wisdom about Enterprise Architecture continues to spin its wheels.”  No need to change a word of that. What little progress at the leading edge was made in 2011 seems to have had no effect in 2012. I think this is largely a consequence of the dust thrown in the eyes of the community by the ascendance of the concept of “Business Architecture,” which is still struggling to define itself.  Business Architecture seems to me to have supplanted last year’s infatuation with “enterprise transformation” as the means of compensating for the EA community’s entrenched IT-centric perspective.

I think this trend and the quest for a value proposition are symptomatic of the same thing — the urgent need for Enterprise Architecture to make its case to its stakeholder community, especially to the people who are paying the bills. Something I saw in 2011 that became almost epidemic in 2012 is conflation — the inclusion under the Enterprise Architecture umbrella of nearly anything with the slightest taste of “business” to it. This has had the unfortunate effect of further obscuring the unique contribution of Enterprise Architecture, which is to bring architectural thinking to bear on the design of human enterprise.

So, while I’m not quite mired in the slough of despond, I am discouraged by the community’s inability to advance the state of the art. In a private communication to some colleagues I wrote, “the conventional wisdom on EA is at about the same state of maturity as 14th century cosmology. It is obvious to even the most casual observer that the earth is both flat and the center of the universe. We debate what happens when you fall off the edge of the Earth, and is the flat earth carried on the back of a turtle or an elephant?  Does the walking of the turtle or elephant rotate the crystalline sphere of the heavens, or does the rotation of the sphere require the turtlephant to walk to keep the earth level?  These are obviously the questions we need to answer.”

Cloud

By Chris Harding, Director of Interoperability

2012 has seen the establishment of Cloud Computing as a mainstream resource for enterprise architects and the emergence of Big Data as the latest hot topic, likely to be mainstream for the future. Meanwhile, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has kept its position as an architectural style of choice for delivering distributed solutions, and the move to ever more powerful mobile devices continues. These trends have been reflected in the activities of our Cloud Computing Work Group and in the continuing support by members of our SOA work.

The use of Cloud, Mobile Computing, and Big Data to deliver on-line systems that are available anywhere at any time is setting a new norm for customer expectations. In 2013, we will see the development of Enterprise Architecture practice to ensure the consistent delivery of these systems by IT professionals, and to support the evolution of creative new computing solutions.

IT systems are there to enable the business to operate more effectively. Customers expect constant on-line access through mobile and other devices. Business organizations work better when they focus on their core capabilities, and let external service providers take care of the rest. On-line data is a huge resource, so far largely untapped. Distributed, Cloud-enabled systems, using Big Data, and architected on service-oriented principles, are the best enablers of effective business operations. There will be a convergence of SOA, Mobility, Cloud Computing, and Big Data as they are seen from the overall perspective of the enterprise architect.

Within The Open Group, the SOA and Cloud Work Groups will continue their individual work, and will collaborate with other forums and work groups, and with outside organizations, to foster the convergence of IT disciplines for distributed computing.

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by | December 7, 2012 · 5:00 AM

Different Words Meant Different Things, Part 3

By Leonard Fehskens, The Open Group

In the second part of this series, I examined the effect of our definition of enterprise on how we think about EA.

To close, I’ll consider the implications of a more inclusive concept of enterprise on the future of Enterprise Architecture.

The current cohort of EAs who have grown accustomed to a misnamed and narrowly focused discipline will eventually retire.  They will be replaced, over time, by EAs who learn the discipline in academic programs rather than by making it up on the job.  They will chuckle in amusement at a “body of knowledge” that is like that of medicine before germ theory, geology before plate tectonics, or astronomy before heliocentrism.  These programs are being created now, and academics are not interested in teaching a discipline with an irrational and inconsistent vocabulary.  They don’t want to have to explain to their students that it is for “historical reasons” that “enterprise means the IT part of a business.”

The focus of an academic program on Enterprise Architecture will necessarily reflect the prevailing concept of enterprise.  The commonly used model of Enterprise Architecture being about people, process and technology provides a useful context for considering this influence.

An IT-centric concept of Enterprise Architecture, like the one currently espoused by most of the community, will emphasize the role of information technology in supporting the needs of the business.  It will include just enough about business and people to enable practitioners to address the goal of “aligning IT with the business.”

A concept of Enterprise Architecture based on the idea of enterprise as business will emphasize business, especially business processes, as they are the primary locus of technological support.  It will include just enough about information technology and people to enable practitioners to address the goal of making IT a strategic asset for businesses.

A concept of Enterprise Architecture based on the idea of enterprise as human endeavor will emphasize the role of people, and be built around the sociology and psychology of individuals, groups and organizations, especially leadership and management as means to achieving organizational goals.  It will devote some attention to business as a particular kind of enterprise, but will look at other forms of enterprise and their unique concerns as well.  Finally, it will consider technology in its most general sense as the means of instantiating the infrastructure necessary to realize an enterprise.  There will be a lot of harumphing about how the conventional wisdom is correct by definition because it is what is practiced by the majority of practitioners, but there is a noisy and insistent contingent that will continue to point out that the world is not flat and the sun does not go around the earth.  Only time will tell, but however you measure it, over 90% of most organizations is “not-IT”, and the IT-centric perspective is simply so imbalanced that it can’t ultimately prevail.

Adopting a broader concept of enterprise consistent with its meaning in common English usage does not in any way invalidate any of the current applications or interpretations of Enterprise Architecture.  It simply allows the application of architectural thinking to other kinds of purposeful human activity besides commercial business organizations to be subsumed under the rubric “Enterprise Architecture”.  All entities that are enterprises by these more restrictive definitions clearly fit unchanged into this more inclusive definition of enterprise.

 Len Fehskens is Vice President of Skills and Capabilities at The Open Group. He is responsible for The Open Group’s activities relating to the professionalization of the discipline of enterprise architecture. Prior to joining The Open Group, Len led the Worldwide Architecture Profession Office for HP Services at Hewlett-Packard. He majored in Computer Science at MIT, and has over 40 years of experience in the IT business as both an individual contributor and a manager, within both product engineering and services business units. Len has worked for Digital Equipment Corporation, Data General Corporation, Prime Computer, Compaq and Hewlett Packard.  He is the lead inventor on six software patents on the object oriented management of distributed systems.

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by | December 6, 2012 · 5:00 AM

Different Words Mean Different Things, Part 2

By Leonard Fehskens, The Open Group

In the first part of this series, I proposed distinct meanings of enterprise, business, organization and corporation.

As I noted earlier, you don’t have to agree with the distinctions I am making here.  But words are a finite, “nonrenewable” resource – if you treat these four words as interchangeable synonyms, you will not be able to make these distinctions without finding other words to make them for you.  In particular, you will not be able to distinguish an endeavor from the means of realizing it (similar to confusing an architecture and a blueprint).  You will not be able to distinguish one particular kind of endeavor (for example, a commercial endeavor) from other kinds of endeavors.  You will not be able to distinguish one particular kind of organization from other kinds of organizations.

Treating these four words as synonyms makes these words unavailable to describe larger and more inclusive domains for the application of architectural thinking.  What’s more, it does so needlessly.  This discipline doesn’t need synonyms any more than an organization needs multiple different systems that do the same thing.  Synonyms are redundancies that reduce the expressive power of the language we use to talk about what we do.  We need to be able to make distinctions between things that are important to distinguish from one another, and there are only so many words available to us to do so.

I acknowledge that for most of the community of practicing business and enterprise architects, most if not all of their practice occurs in the context of business-as-commercial-entities.  It is therefore not surprising that many people in the Business and Enterprise Architecture communities would not believe these distinctions are worth making, and be perfectly happy to (if not insistent that we) treat these words as synonyms.  But we have to be careful to avoid the example of the six blind men and the elephant, and being able to explain a predisposition to make these words synonymous doesn’t make it the right thing to do.

There’s even a contingent that insists that enterprise doesn’t just mean a commercial business organization, that it means a specific kind of commercial business organization, one that exceeds some critical threshold with respect to its scale, complexity, sophistication, ambition or consequence.  This is a bit like insisting that the implied “building” in “(building) architecture” means “commercial building”, or more specifically, “skyscraper.”

The problem with this concept of enterprise arises when one tries to specify the objective criteria by which one distinguishes a mere business from the bigger, more complex, more sophisticated, more ambitious or more consequential business that deserves to be called an enterprise.  It is certainly the case that the larger, more complex, more sophisticated, more ambitious and more consequential a commercial business organization is, the more likely architectural thinking will be necessary and beneficial.  But this observation about Enterprise Architecture does not mean that we ought to define enterprise to mean a large, complex, sophisticated, ambitious and consequential commercial business organization.

Why have so many naval vessels been named Enterprise?  Why was the Starship Enterprise from the Star Trek franchise so named, and why was this thought to be an appropriate name for the first space shuttle?  It was not because these vessels embodied some idea of a commercial business organization or because the word connoted a big, complex, sophisticated, ambitious or consequential business.  And surely if the latter had been the reason, there would be many lesser vessels named simply “Business”?

There are two significant consequences to basing Enterprise Architecture (EA) on a concept of enterprise that is limited to a particular kind of organization.  The first has to do with the applicability of the discipline, and the second has to do with how we educate enterprise architects.

If we restrict the definition of enterprise to a specific kind of purposeful activity, whether the criteria we use for this restriction are subjective or objective, we must either argue that architectural thinking is inapplicable to those purposeful activities that do not satisfy these restrictions, or we have to find a word to denote the larger class of purposeful activities to which architectural thinking applies, a class that includes both the restricted concept of enterprise and all other activities to which architectural thinking applies.

If enterprise means the same thing as commercial business organization, what do we call an entity that is not a commercial business organization (e.g., a church, a hospital, a government, or an army)?  Does Enterprise Architecture not apply to such endeavors because they are not created primarily to conduct business transactions?  What do we call organizations that are not businesses?  If we want to talk about an organization that is a business, why can’t we just use the compound “business organization”, which not only does not erase the distinction, it makes clear the relationship between the two?  Similarly, if we want to talk about an enterprise that is a business, as an enterprise, why can’t we just use the compound “business enterprise”?

Similarly, what should we call the architectural discipline that applies to human enterprise in general, and of which any more narrowly defined concept of Enterprise Architecture is necessarily a specialization?

Expanding definitions

The recent surge of interest in “Business Architecture” is, in my opinion, reflective of both the realization by the community that the historically IT-centric focus of Enterprise Architecture is unnecessarily circumscribed, and the lack of a systematic and internally consistent concept of Enterprise Architecture shared throughout that community.

There is a growing faction within the EA community that argues that most of Enterprise Architecture as practiced is actually enterprise IT architecture (EITA), and calling this practice EA is a misuse of the term.  Despite this, the widespread adoption of the egregiously oversimplified model of an enterprise as comprising “the business” and IT, and thus, Enterprise Architecture as comprising “Business Architecture” and “IT Architecture”, has led to the emergence of “Business Architecture” as a distinct if ill-defined concept.

It seems to me that many people consider Enterprise Architecture to be so hopelessly tainted by its historic IT-centricity that they view the best course to be allowing Enterprise Architecture to continue to be misused to mean EITA, and letting Business Architecture take its place as what EA “should have meant.”  I note in passing that there are some people who insist that EA “has always meant,” or at least “originally” meant, the architecture of the enterprise as a whole, but was hijacked by the IT community, though no one has been able to provide other than thirty year old recollections to support this assertion.

As I noted at the outset, I think Enterprise Architecture should encompass the application of architectural thinking to human endeavors of all kinds, not just those that are primarily business in nature, including, for example, governmental, military, religious, academic, or medical enterprises.  Yes, these endeavors all have some business aspects, but they are not what we normally call businesses, and calling the discipline “Business Architecture” almost unavoidably encourages us to overlook the architectural needs of such non-business-centric endeavors and focus instead on the needs of one specific kind of endeavor.

We have the words to name these things properly. We simply have to start doing so.

In part 3 of this series, I’ll consider the implications of a more inclusive concept of enterprise on the future of Enterprise Architecture.

 Len Fehskens is Vice President of Skills and Capabilities at The Open Group. He is responsible for The Open Group’s activities relating to the professionalization of the discipline of enterprise architecture. Prior to joining The Open Group, Len led the Worldwide Architecture Profession Office for HP Services at Hewlett-Packard. He majored in Computer Science at MIT, and has over 40 years of experience in the IT business as both an individual contributor and a manager, within both product engineering and services business units. Len has worked for Digital Equipment Corporation, Data General Corporation, Prime Computer, Compaq and Hewlett Packard.  He is the lead inventor on six software patents on the object oriented management of distributed systems.

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by | December 4, 2012 · 5:00 AM

Different Words Mean Different Things, Part 1

By Leonard Fehskens, The Open Group

Over on the LinkedIn Enterprise Architecture Network discussion group there is a thread on the relationship between Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Business Architecture that as of late November 2012 had run to over 4100 comments.

Some of the sprawl of this thread is due to the usual lack of discipline in staying on topic.  Some of it is due to the rehashing of well-worn themes as newcomers arrive.  It seems clear to me though, that even when long time contributors try to move the subject forward, a lot of the back and forth that fails to converge is a consequence of the community’s lack of an appropriate and widely shared vocabulary.

In particular, there are four words that many in the Enterprise and Business Architecture communities seem to use interchangeably – enterprise, business, organization and corporation.

Before I tackle this subject, there is some context I should provide.

First, people who know me consider me to be obsessive about the precise use of language, and they’re right.  I think of Enterprise Architecture as more a craft than a science, and as such, the language we use to express it is ordinary language (as opposed to, for example, mathematics).  To me it follows that it is especially important that we use that language carefully.

Second, I’m coming at this from the perspective of creating a profession and its supporting ecosystem.  I believe a profession should be broadly applicable, with specializations within the profession addressing more narrowly focused concerns.

Finally, though much of the discussion about Enterprise Architecture is in English, I acknowledge that for a large fraction of the community English is a second (or third) language.  So, while this post is specifically about English usage, I suspect much of it applies as well to other languages, and I don’t want to imply that the conventions of English usage are the only ones worthy of consideration.

That’s enough by way of preamble.

The EA community may not have agreed upon definitions of many of the words it uses, but as these words are drawn from the vernacular, the rest of the world does.  This conventional usage makes clear distinctions between enterprise, business, organization and corporation.

While it is true that these words all have some sense in which they are roughly synonymous, they have primary definitions that distinguish them from one another.  I think we ought to observe these distinctions because they are useful, especially in that they allow us to sensibly relate the concepts they represent to one another, and they do not needlessly foreclose the broader application of these concepts.

First, I’m going to propose definitions for these words to be used in the context of Enterprise Architecture.  Then I’m going to look at what these definitions imply about the relationships between the things these words denote, and how the current usage obscures or denies these relationships.

It’s very possible, if not likely, that you will not agree with these definitions.  I’ll deal with that later.

Enterprise

The Oxford English Dictionary (Compact Edition, 1971) defines “enterprise” as:

Derived from the French entreprendre, “to take in hand, undertake”.

    1. A design of which the execution is attempted; a piece of work taken in hand, an undertaking; chiefly, and now exclusively, a bold, arduous, or momentous undertaking.
      • b. engagement in such undertaking
    2. Disposition or readiness to engage in undertakings of difficulty, risk, or danger; daring spirit.
    3. The action of taking in hand; management, superintendence. Obsolete.

So, enterprise means “undertaking” or “endeavor,” especially one that is relatively ambitious.  Implicit in this concept of enterprise is the intentional action of one of more people.  It is intentional in the sense that the action is intended to achieve some outcome.  The role of people is important; we do not generally consider machines, regardless of their purpose, to exhibit “enterprise” in this sense.  For me, the essential properties of an enterprise are people and their activity in pursuit of explicit intent.

This is a deliberately, very broadly inclusive concept of enterprise.  All of the following are, in my opinion, enterprises:

  • A child’s lemonade stand
  • A club
  • A professional society
  • A committee or working group
  • A town, state or country government
  • An international/multinational coalition
  • A military unit
  • A department or ministry of defense
  • A for-profit, non-profit or not-for-profit corporation
  • A partnership
  • A consortium
  • A church
  • A university or college
  • A hospital

Business

English speakers commonly use the word “business” to mean three things, and are usually able to infer the intended meaning from context.  These three common meanings of business are:

Business-as-commerce: The exchange of goods and services for some form of compensation for the costs and risks of doing so.

Business-as-commercial-entity: An entity whose primary activity is the conduct of some form of business-as-commerce.  In colloquial terms, the primary purpose of such an entity is to “make money”, and if it does not “make money” it will “go out of business.”

Business-as-primary-concern: The primary concern or activity of some entity.

These three different commonly understood meanings of business make it possible for someone to say something like:

“The business of my business is business.”

I.e., “The business-as-primary-concern of my business-as-commercial-entity is business-as-commerce.”

Organization

An “organization” is a structured (i.e., “organized”) group of people and resources, usually acting in concert to achieve some shared purpose.

Corporation

Finally, a “corporation” is an organization structured and operated in a particular way so as to satisfy certain legal constraints and thus benefit from the legal consequences of that conformance.  Strictly speaking, a corporation is a legal entity that has an organization associated with it.  In the case of a “shell” or “dummy” corporation, the associated organization’s people and resources may be minimal.

Observations

Based on these definitions, one can make some observations.

An organization is typically the means by which an enterprise is realized.  Small scale enterprises may be realized by a single individual, which is a trivial case of an organization.

Not all organizations are business-as-commercial-entities.  Organizations that are not businesses will almost certainly conduct some business-as-commerce as an adjunct activity in support of their primary intent.

Not all enterprises have as their intent some form of business-as-commerce. An organization that realizes such an enterprise will not be a business-as-commercial-entity.  While all business-as-commercial-entities realize an enterprise, not all enterprises are realized by business-as-commercial-entities.

Not all organizations are corporations.

Not all business-as-commercial-entities are corporations.

These relationships are depicted below.

 Len diagram

This is a three-part series that discusses how our vocabulary affects the way we conceptualize Enterprise Architecture, Business Architecture and their relationship.  Part 2 will examine the effect of our definition of enterprise on how we think about EA. 

 Len Fehskens is Vice President of Skills and Capabilities at The Open Group. He is responsible for The Open Group’s activities relating to the professionalization of the discipline of enterprise architecture. Prior to joining The Open Group, Len led the Worldwide Architecture Profession Office for HP Services at Hewlett-Packard. He majored in Computer Science at MIT, and has over 40 years of experience in the IT business as both an individual contributor and a manager, within both product engineering and services business units. Len has worked for Digital Equipment Corporation, Data General Corporation, Prime Computer, Compaq and Hewlett Packard.  He is the lead inventor on six software patents on the object oriented management of distributed systems.

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by | August 14, 2012 · 8:30 AM

Challenges to Building a Global Identity Ecosystem

By Jim Hietala and Ian Dobson, The Open Group

In our five identity videos from the Jericho Forum, a forum of The Open Group:

  • Video #1 explained the “Identity First Principles” – about people (or any entity) having a core identity and how we all operate with a number of personas.
  • Video #2 “Operating with Personas” explained how we use a digital core identifier to create digital personas –as many as we like – to mirror the way we use personas in our daily lives.
  • Video #3 described how “Trust and Privacy” interact to provide a trusted privacy-enhanced identity ecosystem.
  • Video #4 “Entities and Entitlement” explained why identity is not just about people – we must include all entities that we want to identify in our digital world, and how “entitlement” rules control access to resources.

In this fifth video – Building a Global Identity Ecosystem – we highlight what we need to change and develop to build a viable identity ecosystem.

The Internet is global, so any identity ecosystem similarly must be capable of being adopted and implemented globally.

This means that establishing a trust ecosystem is essential to widespread adoption of an identity ecosystem. To achieve this, an identity ecosystem must demonstrate its architecture is sufficiently robust to scale to handle the many billions of entities that people all over the world will want, not only to be able to assert their identities and attributes, but also to handle the identities they will also want for all their other types of entities.

It also means that we need to develop an open implementation reference model, so that anyone in the world can develop and implement interoperable identity ecosystem identifiers, personas, and supporting services.

In addition, the trust ecosystem for asserting identities and attributes must be robust, to allow entities to make assertions that relying parties can be confident to consume and therefore use to make risk-based decisions. Agile roots of trust are vital if the identity ecosystem is to have the necessary levels of trust in entities, personas and attributes.

Key to the trust in this whole identity ecosystem is being able to immutably (enduringly and changelessly) link an entity to a digital Core Identifier, so that we can place full trust in knowing that only the person (or other type of entity) holding that Core Identifier can be the person (or other type of entity) it was created from, and no-one or thing can impersonate it. This immutable binding must be created in a form that guarantees the binding and include the interfaces necessary to connect with the digital world.  It should also be easy and cost-effective for all to use.

Of course, the cryptography and standards that this identity ecosystem depends on must be fully open, peer-reviewed and accepted, and freely available, so that all governments and interested parties can assure themselves, just as they can with AES encryption today, that it’s truly open and there are no barriers to implementation. The technologies needed around cryptography, one-way trusts, and zero-knowledge proofs, all exist today, and some of these are already implemented. They need to be gathered into a standard that will support the required model.

Adoption of an identity ecosystem requires a major mindset change in the thinking of relying parties – to receive, accept and use trusted identities and attributes from the identity ecosystem, rather than creating, collecting and verifying all this information for themselves. Being able to consume trusted identities and attributes will bring significant added value to relying parties, because the information will be up-to-date and from authoritative sources, all at significantly lower cost.

Now that you have followed these five Identity Key Concepts videos, we encourage you to use our Identity, Entitlement and Access (IdEA) commandments as the test to evaluate the effectiveness of all identity solutions – existing and proposed. The Open Group is also hosting an hour-long webinar that will preview all five videos and host an expert Q&A shortly afterward on Thursday, August 16.

Jim Hietala, CISSP, GSEC, is the Vice President, Security for The Open Group, where he manages all IT security and risk management programs and standards activities. He participates in the SANS Analyst/Expert program and has also published numerous articles on information security, risk management, and compliance topics in publications including The ISSA Journal, Bank Accounting & Finance, Risk Factor, SC Magazine, and others.

 

Ian Dobson is the director of the Security Forum and the Jericho Forum for The Open Group, coordinating and facilitating the members to achieve their goals in our challenging information security world.  In the Security Forum, his focus is on supporting development of open standards and guides on security architectures and management of risk and security, while in the Jericho Forum he works with members to anticipate the requirements for the security solutions we will need in future.

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by | August 8, 2012 · 3:30 AM

ArchiMate 2.0 – Ready for the Future of Enterprise Architecture!

By Henry Franken, BIZZdesign

Models have played an important role in business for a long time. Process models, information- and data models, application landscapes, strategic models, operational models – you name it, organizations have tried it. With the rise of Enterprise Architecture (EA) as a strategic discipline for many organizations, we saw two interesting developments. First of all, organizations try to connect their models, to gain insight in the way the enterprise works from many different perspectives. Secondly, we saw the trend that models become more high-level, focusing on the essence of the organization.

These developments have led to the development of the ArchiMate® language, which allows high-level modeling within a domain, but allows modeling the relations between domains. Even more, in recognition that architecture is a communications game, a key driver for the language was to also allow for effective visualizations for key stakeholders based on solid architectural analyses.

The first edition of the ArchiMate language enabled organizations to create holistic architecture models with concepts from three domains: business, application and technology. With a handful of concepts and relations, this allowed organizations to model the relation between products and services, processes, supporting applications and information, as well as infrastructure. Having modeled this formally, organizations can do impact assessments, generate visualizations for various stakeholders and so on.

ArchiMate has recently been extended by members within the ArchiMate Forum within The Open Group), resulting in ArchiMate 2.0 – a new version of ArchiMate that is fully aligned with The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF®). Two new extensions have been developed for this purpose, making sure the language now covers the entire Architecture Development Method (ADM) of TOGAF.

The new motivation extension allows organizations to graphically model the answer to the “why” question of EA: Who are key stakeholders of EA? What are their drivers? How do these drivers lead to principles and requirements that are realized in the architecture? This extension mainly aligns with the early phases of the TOGAF ADM.

The new ArchiMate 2.0 standard also has an implementation and migration extension that aligns with the later phases of the ADM. Using this extension, architects can align with project management and graphically model plateaus, projects and programs, as well as their deliverables.

One of the key strengths of ArchiMate – as well as TOGAF – is its openness – it allows practitioners worldwide to join in and help push the language forward. Indeed, we are seeing the adoption of the language, as well as certifications of practitioners grow worldwide.

The Open Group has introduced certification programs for individuals, training vendors and tool vendors, and the uptake of these programs is very successful! We are now seeing many individuals obtaining an ArchiMate 2.0 certificate, training vendors applying for training accreditation, and tool vendors implementing the ArchiMate modeling language into Enterprise Architecture modeling tools, all while  being certified by The Open Group.

With all these great developments within the last few years – fluent integration with TOGAF and a fast growing number of professionals using ArchiMate – I believe it is safe to say that with ArchiMate 2.0 you are ready for the future of Enterprise Architecture!

Henry Franken is the managing director of BiZZdesign and is chair of The Open Group ArchiMate Forum. As chair of The Open Group ArchiMate Forum, Henry led the development of the ArchiMate Version 2.o standard. Henry is a speaker at many conferences and has co-authored several international publications and Open Group White Papers. Henry is co-founder of the BPM-Forum. At BiZZdesign, Henry is responsible for research and innovation.

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by | August 1, 2012 · 9:45 AM

Video Highlights Day 2 of Washington, D.C.

By The Open Group Conference Team

How can you use the tools of Enterprise Architecture and open standards to improve the capability of your company doing business? The Day 2 speakers of The Open Group Conference in Washington, D.C. addressed this question, focusing on Enterprise Transformation. Sessions included:

  • “Case Study: University Health Network (Toronto),” by Jason Uppal, chief enterprise architect at QR Systems, Inc. and winner of the 2012 Edison Award for Innovation
  • “Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE™): Transforming the DoD Avionics Software Industry Through the Use of Open Standards,” by Judy Cerenzia, FACE™ program director at The Open Group, Kirk Avery, chief software architect at Lockheed Martin and Philip Minor, director at System of Systems of Engineering Directorate at the Office of Chief Systems Engineer, ASA(ALT)
  • “Using the TOGAF® Architecture Content Framework with the ArchiMate® Modeling Language,” by Henry Franken, CEO of BIZZdesign, and Iver Band, enterprise architect at Standard Insurance

David Lounsbury, CTO of The Open Group summarizes some of the day’s sessions:

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by | June 22, 2012 · 12:11 PM

Learn How Enterprise Architects Can Better Relate TOGAF and DoDAF to Bring Best IT Practices to Defense Contracts

By Dana Gardner, Interarbor Solutions

This BriefingsDirect thought leadership interview comes in conjunction with The Open Group Conference in Washington, D.C., beginning July 16. The conference will focus on how Enterprise Architecture (EA), enterprise transformation, and securing global supply chains.

We’re joined by one of the main speakers at the July 16 conference, Chris Armstrong, President of Armstrong Process Group, to examine how governments in particular are using various frameworks to improve their architectural planning and IT implementations.

Armstrong is an internationally recognized thought leader in EA, formal modeling, process improvement, systems and software engineering, requirements management, and iterative and agile development.

He represents the Armstrong Process Group at the Open Group, the Object Management Group (OMG), and Eclipse Foundation. Armstrong also co-chairs The Open Group Architectural Framework (TOGAF®), and Model Driven Architecture (MDA) process modeling efforts, and also the TOGAF 9 Tool Certification program, all at The Open Group.

At the conference, Armstrong will examine the use of TOGAF 9 to deliver Department of Defense (DoD) Architecture Framework or DoDAF 2 capabilities. And in doing so, we’ll discuss how to use TOGAF architecture development methods to drive the development and use of DoDAF 2 architectures for delivering new mission and program capabilities. His presentation will also be Livestreamed free from The Open Group Conference. The full podcast can be found here.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: TOGAF and DoDAF, where have they been? Where are they going? And why do they need to relate to one another more these days?

Armstrong: TOGAF [forms] a set of essential components for establishing and operating an EA capability within an organization. And it contains three of the four key components of any EA.

First, the method by which EA work is done, including how it touches other life cycles within the organization and how it’s governed and managed. Then, there’s a skills framework that talks about the skills and experiences that the individual practitioners must have in order to participate in the EA work. Then, there’s a taxonomy framework that describes the semantics and form of the deliverables and the knowledge that the EA function is trying to manage.

One-stop shop

One of the great things that TOGAF has going for it is that, on the one hand, it’s designed to be a one-stop shop — namely providing everything that a end-user organization might need to establish an EA practice. But it does acknowledge that there are other components, predominantly in the various taxonomies and reference models, that various end-user organizations may want to substitute or augment.

It turns out that TOGAF has a nice synergy with other taxonomies, such as DoDAF, as it provides the backdrop for how to establish the overall EA capability, how to exploit it, and put it into practice to deliver new business capabilities.

Frameworks, such as DoDAF, focus predominantly on the taxonomy, mainly the kinds of things we’re keeping track of, the semantics relationships, and perhaps some formalism on how they’re structured. There’s a little bit of method guidance within DoDAF, but not a lot. So we see the marriage of the two as a natural synergy.

Gardner: So their complementary natures allows for more particulars on the defense side, but the overall TOGAF looks at the implementation method and skills for how this works best. Is this something new, or are we just learning to do it better?

Armstrong: I think we’re seeing the state of industry advance and looking at trying to have the federal government, both United States and abroad, embrace global industry standards for EA work. Historically, particularly in the US government, a lot of defense agencies and their contractors have often been focusing on a minimalistic compliance perspective with respect to DoDAF. In order to get paid for this work or be authorized to do this work, one of our requirements is we must produce DoDAF.

People are doing that because they’ve been commanded to do it. We’re seeing a new level of awareness. There’s some synergy with what’s going on in the DoDAF space, particularly as it relates to migrating from DoDAF 1.5 to DoDAF 2.

Agencies need some method and technique guidance on exactly how to come up with those particular viewpoints that are going to be most relevant, and how to exploit what DoDAF has to offer, in a way that advances the business as opposed to just solely being to conforming or compliant?

Gardner: Have there been hurdles, perhaps culturally, because of the landscape of these different companies and their inability to have that boundary-less interaction. What’s been the hurdle? What’s prevented this from being more beneficial at that higher level?

Armstrong: Probably overall organizational and practitioner maturity. There certainly are a lot of very skilled organizations and individuals out there. However, we’re trying to get them all lined up with the best practice for establishing an EA capability and then operating it and using it to a business strategic advantage, something that TOGAF defines very nicely and which the DoDAF taxonomy and work products hold in very effectively.

Gardner: Help me understand, Chris. Is this discussion that you’ll be delivering on July 16 primarily for TOGAF people to better understand how to implement vis-à-vis, DoDAF, is this the other direction, or is it a two-way street?

Two-way street

Armstrong: It’s a two-way street. One of the big things that particularly the DoD space has going for it is that there’s quite a bit of maturity in the notion of formally specified models, as DoDAF describes them, and the various views that DoDAF includes.

We’d like to think that, because of that maturity, the general TOGAF community can glean a lot of benefit from the experience they’ve had. What does it take to capture these architecture descriptions, some of the finer points about managing some of those assets. People within the TOGAF general community are always looking for case studies and best practices that demonstrate to them that what other people are doing is something that they can do as well.

We also think that the federal agency community also has a lot to glean from this. Again, we’re trying to get some convergence on standard methods and techniques, so that they can more easily have resources join their teams and immediately be productive and add value to their projects, because they’re all based on a standard EA method and framework.

One of the major changes between DoDAF 1 and DoDAF 2 is the focusing on fitness for purpose. In the past, a lot of organizations felt that it was their obligation to describe all architecture viewpoints that DoDAF suggests without necessarily taking a step back and saying, “Why would I want to do that?”

So it’s trying to make the agencies think more critically about how they can be the most agile, mainly what’s the least amount of architecture description that we can invest and that has the greatest possible value. Organizations now have the discretion to determine what fitness for purpose is.

Then, there’s the whole idea in DoDAF 2, that the architecture is supposed to be capability-driven. That is, you’re not just describing architecture, because you have some tools that happened to be DoDAF conforming, but there is a new business capability that you’re trying to inject into the organization through capability-based transformation, which is going to involve people, process, and tools.

One of the nice things that TOGAF’s architecture development method has to offer is a well-defined set of activities and best practices for deciding how you determine what those capabilities are and how you engage your stakeholders to really help collect the requirements for what fit for purpose means.

Gardner: As with the private sector, it seems that everyone needs to move faster. I see you’ve been working on agile development. With organizations like the OMG and Eclipse is there something that doing this well — bringing the best of TOGAF and DoDAF together — enables a greater agility and speed when it comes to completing a project?

Different perspectives

Armstrong: Absolutely. When you talk about what agile means to the general community, you may get a lot of different perspectives and a lot of different answers. Ultimately, we at APG feel that agility is fundamentally about how well your organization responds to change.

If you take a step back, that’s really what we think is the fundamental litmus test of the goodness of an architecture. Whether it’s an EA, a segment architecture, or a system architecture, the architects need to think thoughtfully and considerately about what things are almost certainly going to happen in the near future. I need to anticipate, and be able to work these into my architecture in such a way that when these changes occur, the architecture can respond in a timely, relevant fashion.

We feel that, while a lot of people think that agile is just a pseudonym for not planning, not making commitments, going around in circles forever, we call that chaos, another five letter word. But agile in our experience really demands rigor, and discipline.

Of course, a lot of the culture of the DoD brings that rigor and discipline to it, but also the experience that that community has had, in particular, of formally modeling architecture description. That sets up those government agencies to act agilely much more than others.

Gardner: Do you know of anyone that has done it successfully or is in the process? Even if you can’t name them, perhaps you can describe how something like this works?

Armstrong: First, there has been some great work done by the MITRE organization through their work in collaboration at The Open Group. They’ve written a white paper that talks about which DoDAF deliverables are likely to be useful in specific architecture development method activities. We’re going to be using that as a foundation for the talk we’re going to be giving at the conference in July.

The biggest thing that TOGAF has to offer is that a nascent organization that’s jumping into the DoDAF space may just look at it from an initial compliance perspective, saying, “We have to create an AV-1, and an OV-1, and a SvcV-5,” and so on.

Providing guidance

TOGAF will provide the guidance for what is EA. Why should I care? What kind of people do I need within my organization? What kind of skills do they need? What kind of professional certification might be appropriate to get all of the participants up on the same page, so that when we’re talking about EA, we’re all using the same language?

TOGAF also, of course, has a great emphasis on architecture governance and suggests that immediately, when you’re first propping up your EA capability, you need to put into your plan how you’re going to operate and maintain these architectural assets, once they’ve been produced, so that you can exploit them in some reuse strategy moving forward.

So, the preliminary phase of the TOGAF architecture development method provides those agencies best practices on how to get going with EA, including exactly how an organization is going to exploit what the DoDAF taxonomy framework has to offer.

Then, once an organization or a contractor is charged with doing some DoDAF work, because of a new program or a new capability, they would immediately begin executing Phase A: Architecture Vision, and follow the best practices that TOGAF has to offer.

Just what is that capability that we’re trying to describe? Who are the key stakeholders, and what are their concerns? What are their business objectives and requirements? What constraints are we going to be placed under?

Part of that is to create a high-level description of the current or baseline architecture descriptions, and then the future target state, so that all parties have at least a coarse-grained idea of kind of where we’re at right now, and what our vision is of where we want to be.

Because this is really a high level requirements and scoping set of activities, we expect that that’s going to be somewhat ambiguous. As the project unfolds, they’re going to discover details that may cause some adjustment to that final target.

Internalize best practices

So, we’re seeing defense contractors being able to internalize some of these best practices, and really be prepared for the future so that they can win the greatest amount of business and respond as rapidly and appropriately as possible, as well as how they can exploit these best practices to affect greater business transformation across their enterprises.

Gardner: We mentioned that your discussion on these issues, on July 16 will be Livestreamed for free, but you’re also doing some pre-conference and post-conference activities — webinars, and other things. Tell us how this is all coming together, and for those who are interested, how they could take advantage of all of these.

Armstrong: We’re certainly very privileged that The Open Group has offered this as opportunity to share this content with the community. On Monday, June 25, we’ll be delivering a webinar that focuses on architecture change management in the DoDAF space, particularly how an organization migrates from DoDAF 1 to DoDAF 2.

I’ll be joined by a couple of other people from APG, David Rice, one of our Principal Enterprise Architects who is a member of the DoDAF 2 Working Group, as well as J.D. Baker, who is the Co-chair of the OMG’s Analysis and Design Taskforce, and a member of the Unified Profile for DoDAF and MODAF (UPDM) work group, a specification from the OMG.

We’ll be talking about things that organizations need to think about as they migrate from DoDAF 1 to DoDAF 2. We’ll be focusing on some of the key points of the DoDAF 2 meta-model, namely the rearrangement of the architecture viewpoints and the architecture partitions and how that maps from the classical DoDAF 1.5 viewpoint, as well as focusing on this notion of capability-driven architectures and fitness for purpose.

We also have the great privilege after the conference to be delivering a follow-up webinar on implementation methods and techniques around advanced DoDAF architectures. Particularly, we’re going to take a closer look at something that some people may be interested in, namely tool interoperability and how the DoDAF meta-model offers that through what’s called the Physical Exchange Specification (PES).

We’ll be taking a look a little bit more closely at this UPDM thing I just mentioned, focusing on how we can use formal modeling languages based on OMG standards, such as UML, SysML, BPMN, and SoaML, to do very formal architectural modeling.

One of the big challenges with EA is, at the end of the day, EA comes up with a set of policies, principles, assets, and best practices that talk about how the organization needs to operate and realize new solutions within that new framework. If EA doesn’t have a hand-off to the delivery method, namely systems engineering and solution delivery, then none of this architecture stuff makes a bit of a difference.

Driving the realization

We’re going to be talking a little bit about how DoDAF-based architecture description and TOGAF would drive the realization of those capabilities through traditional systems, engineering, and software development method.

************

For more information on The Open Group’s upcoming conference in Washington, D.C., please visit: http://www.opengroup.org/dc2012

Dana Gardner is president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, an enterprise IT analysis, market research, and consulting firm. Gardner, a leading identifier of software and Cloud productivity trends and new IT business growth opportunities, honed his skills and refined his insights as an industry analyst, pundit, and news editor covering the emerging software development and enterprise infrastructure arenas for the last 18 years.

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by | May 21, 2012 · 10:15 AM

Open CA Candidate Profile: An Interview with Andrey Zaychikov

By Steve Philp, The Open Group

Andrey Zaychikov is CIO and Chief Enterprise Architect Ministry of Sport, Tourism and Youth Policy for the Russian Federation

In February 2012, Andrey Zaychikov became the first Russian to go through the Open CA program via the direct route. He flew to London Heathrow from Moscow to attend the certification board at a local hotel near Heathrow airport and successfully achieved Master Open CA status. We asked him why he wanted to get Open CA certified and how he found the process.

Can you tell us something about yourself in terms of your background and career to date?

I started my career as a software developer with a Master’s degree in computer science and more than five years experience in creating applications using C, C++ and .NET. In those days I was eager to understand how to define the solution requirements and design its implementation, how to deal with the risks, how to organize the communication with customers in a most effective manner. I applied different approaches based on Booch-2 (in early days), then UML etc. They were quite effective (of course, if adopted to the needs of the particular projects and being common-sense) especially talking about small or medium silo applications.

In 2007, I was put in charge of a huge project involving more than 300 organizations within the enterprise and affecting 80 percent of its operational activities. The enormous complexity of this project forced me to look for the other ways to handle it. I found out that enterprise architecture was the only solution to deal with that issue. That was the start of my career as an Enterprise Architect.

Why did you decide to go for Open CA certification?

On the one hand, I had some problems with the quality of assessment of my professional skills and assessment of my approach to defining and governing enterprise architectures, and on the other hand it was a real chance to demonstrate the level of my personal skills and acquirement to the customers, employees, colleagues and competitors.  Besides, it is a good line in a CV to refer to and it will help to boost my career.

Why is Open CA different from other IT certifications that you have previously been involved with?

I chose Open CA Certification Program because it is:

  • Really vendor, country and methods neutral
  • Based on best practices
  • A great challenge to succeed as an Enterprise Architect
  • A unique chance to assess one’s personal skills and acquirement against the world’s best professionals
  • It is linked to a certified professional and not to a company
  • It helps to determine one’s strengths and weaknesses
  • It is instrumental in building one’s personal development and educational plan
  • It is one of the most prestigious enterprise architecture certifications.

In fact, as I thought, it could really help me to define my place in the world of enterprise architecture and to look at myself from another point of view. It helps not only to assess one’s methodological, technical or business skills but also to assess one’s common approach to work in the terms of enterprise architecture.

How did you prepare for Open CA certification?

My preparation was organized in a step-by-step manner.  First of all, I read the Conformance Requirements and a sample package in order to understand what I should do at the first stage of the certification. I used a  self-assessment tool at this stage as well. Then, I completed the experience profiles because it seemed to me to be far easier to write the profiles rather than the questions section first. I wrote the experience profiles in Russian, my native language and then translated them into English. Therefore, it took me approximately twice as much time as estimated by the Certification Board.

Then I answered the questions in the sections. This time I did not translate them – I just wrote the responses straight in English.

After that I did several reviews of my package in order to squeeze it into 50 pages, simplified some responses and diagrams.

While reviewing my package I tried to conform my package with the requirements and made every response clear to the people who are not aware of the current vertical industry and specific project situation. I watched some sitcoms and read a lot of fiction in English for language practice since I did not use English at work.

Having received the review of my package from The Open Group, I made some minor changes in order to clear up some issues.

Then I began preparation for the interview. I read carefully the certification board member handbook to figure out what the Board might be interested in during the interview. I reviewed my package again trying to ask myself as many questions as I could and answered them mentally, in other words, I tried being in interviewers’ shoes.

Then, taking into consideration the time left before the interview, I chose the most important questions and answered only them in English.

Two days before the interview I read thoroughly my package and the questions again. I arrived to London two days before the interview, again in order to practice the language a bit and not to have the linguistic shock.

What benefits do you think having this certification will bring you?

Despite of the fact that the Open CA certification program is not really well known in Russia, it has already brought me some recognition at Russian IT market, especially among vendors as an excellent and unique specialist. Besides, it really helped me to interact with international community. I think it will speed up my career as a CIO and EA in the near future.

What are your plans for future certifications?

I am planning to progress to Open CA Level 3 in a couple of years. I am thinking over PMBOK certification as well, as I often had to fulfill the role of the project manager in some large projects. Plus, I would like to take TOGAF 9 Certification as my TOGAF 8.1.1 has expired and I am going to continue working on my PhD.

Steve Philp is the Marketing Director for the Open CA and Open CITS certification programs at The Open Group. Over the past 20 years, Steve has worked predominantly in sales, marketing and general management roles within the IT training industry. Based in Reading, UK, he joined the Open Group in 2008 to promote and develop the organization’s skills and experience-based IT certifications.

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by | May 15, 2012 · 2:44 PM

Three Things I Wish I Had Known When I Started My Career

By Leonard Fehskens, The Open Group

It being the time of year for commencement speeches, Patty Donovan asked if I could offer some advice to graduates entering the Enterprise Architecture profession.

She specifically asked what three things I wished I had known when I began my career, and it’s impossible to resist the setup.  I wish I had known:

1)   What stocks to buy and sell when

2)   Which managers at what companies to work for

3)   Which personal relationships to pursue and which to avoid

Had I known these things, my life would likely have been free of much unproductive stress.

OK; that’s not really helpful advice; these aren’t things that one can actually know in advance.

But there are some things that I sort of knew when I got out of school, that in retrospect have proven to be far more important than I imagined at the time.  They are:

1)   Things, especially big things, only get done by collaborating with other people.

2)   Be open to other perspectives.

3)   Nothing in the real world is linear or one-dimensional.

4)   You have to be able to commit, and be prepared to deal with the consequences.

Let’s explore each of these in turn.

Things, especially big things, only get done by collaborating with other people

This seems pretty obvious, but we never seem to take it into account.  Unless you’re a genius of staggering magnitude, your success is going to be largely dependent on your ability to work with other people.

If you majored in some aspect of information systems, unless you minored in psychology or sociology it’s unlikely you took more than one or two elective courses in one or the other.  If you’re lucky, the company you work for will send you on a two or three day “team building exercise” every few years.  If you’re really lucky, you may get sent to a week-long “executive development program” in leadership or “organizational dynamics.”  These sorts of development programs used to be much more common, but are now much harder to cost-justify.  My experience with these things was that they were often interesting, though some of the exercises were a bit contrived.  But the key problem was that whatever one might learn from them was easily forgotten without any subsequent coaching and reinforcement, washed out by the implicit assumption that how to collaborate as part of team is something we all knew how to do intuitively.

So what we’re left with is “learning by doing,” and it’s clear from experience that this basically means picking up habits that, without expert coaching, will be a random mix of both good and bad.  What can we do about this?

Most organizations have an HR policy about staff development plans, and while people are rarely held accountable for not carrying out such a plan, a sensible request to take advantage of the policy will also rarely be refused.  Don’t neglect any opportunity you get to develop your “soft skills” or “people skills.”

 Be open to other perspectives

A thoughtfully open mind—the ability to recognize good ideas and not so good ideas, especially when they’re someone else’s ideas—is probably one of the most useful and most difficult faculties to develop.

It’s a cliché that truly effective communication is difficult.  In practice I have found this often means that we don’t understand why someone takes a position different from ours, and without that understanding, it is too easy to discount that position.  This is compounded by our predisposition, especially among techno-dweeb-weenies, to focus on differences rather than similarities, something Freud called the “narcissism of small differences.”

Fred Brooks (“The Mythical ManMonth,” “The Design of Design”) has long argued that the chief or lead architect is responsible for ensuring the “conceptual integrity” of a design, but this doesn’t mean that all the ideas have to come from that architect.  Nobody has all the answers.  It is the architect’s responsibility to synthesize worthwhile contributions, wherever they come from, into an integrated whole.

 Nothing in the real world is linear or one-dimensional

When I moved on to a new position after leading an architecture team for several years at Digital Equipment Corporation, the team gave me two rubber stamps as a token of their appreciation.  One said “It depends …”, and the other said “Yes, but …”.

Though it’s almost never possible, or sensible, to rank anything non-trivial on a single linear scale, we try to do this all the time.  Simple models of complex things do not make those things simple.  Acting as if they do is called “magical thinking,” for a reason.

So there’s almost never going to be a clearly best answer.  The best we can do is understand what the tradeoffs are, and make them knowingly and deliberately.

 You have to be able to commit, and be prepared to deal with the consequences

Each of the above three lessons tends to complicate things, and complications tend to delay decision-making and commitment to a particular way forward.  While successful architects understand that delayed binding is often an effective design strategy, they also understand that they will never have all the information they need to make a fully informed decision, and finally, and most importantly, that you can’t postpone decisions indefinitely.  They seem to have a knack for understanding which decisions really need to be made when, and how to connect the information they do have into a coherent context for making those decisions.

But they also have contingency plans, and ways to tell as early as possible whether they need to use them.  In a genuinely supportive environment, it will be OK to reconsider a decision, but only if you do so as soon as you realize that you need to.

So, don’t make decisions any sooner than they must be made, but don’t make them any later either, and make sure you don’t “paint yourself into a corner.”

 Len Fehskens is Vice President of Skills and Capabilities at The Open Group. He is responsible for The Open Group’s activities relating to the professionalization of the discipline of enterprise architecture. Prior to joining The Open Group, Len led the Worldwide Architecture Profession Office for HP Services at Hewlett-Packard. Len is based in the US.

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by | January 19, 2012 · 12:30 AM

Enterprise Architects and Paradigm Shifts

By Stuart Boardman, KPN

It’s interesting looking back at what people have written over the course of the year and seeing which themes appear regularly in their blogs. I thought I’d do the same with my own posts for The Open Group and see whether I could pull some of it together. I saw that the recurring themes for me have been dealing with uncertainty, the changing nature of the enterprise and the influence of information technology from outside the enterprise – and all of this in relation to the practice of enterprise architecture. I also explored the mutual influences these themes have on each other.

Unsurprisingly I’m not alone in picking up on these themes. At the risk of offending anyone I don’t mention, I note that Serge Thorn, Raghuraman Krishnamurthy and Len Fehskens have given their own perspectives on The Open Group’s Blog on some or all of these themes. And of course there’s plenty of writing on these themes going on in the blogosphere at large. In one sense I think writing about this is part of a process of trying to understand what’s going on in the world.

After some reflection, it seems to me that all of this converges in what tends to be called ”social business.” For better or worse, there is no fixed definition of the term. I would say it describes a way of working where, both within and across organizations, hierarchies and rules are being replaced by networks and collaboration. The concept of the enterprise in such a system is then definitively extended to include a whole ecosystem of customers and suppliers as well as investors and beneficiaries. Any one organization is just a part of the enterprise – a stakeholder. And of course the enterprise will look different dependent on the viewpoint of a particular stakeholder. That should be a familiar concept anyway for an enterprise architect. That one participant can be a stakeholder in multiple enterprises is not really new – it’s just something we now have no choice but to take into account.

Within any one organization, social business means that creativity and strategy development takes place at and across multiple levels. We can speak of networked, podular or fractal forms of organization. It also means a lot of other things with wider economic, social and political implications but that’s not my focus here.

Another important aspect is the relationship with newer developments in information and communication technology. We can’t separate social business from the technology which has helped it to develop and which in turn is stimulated by its existence and demands. I don’t mean any one technology and I won’t even insist on restricting it to information technology. But it’s clear that there is at least a high degree of synergy between newer IT developments and social business. In other words, the more an organization becomes a social business, the more its business will involve the use of information technology – not as a support function but as an essential part of how it does its business.  Moreover exactly this usage of IT is not and cannot be (entirely) under its own control.

A social business therefore demonstrates, in all aspects of the enterprise, fuzzy boundaries and a higher level of what I call entropy (uncertainty, rate of change, sensitivity to change). It means we need new ways of dealing with complexity, which fortunately is a topic a lot of people are looking at. It means that simplicity is not in every case a desirable goal and that, scary as it may seem, we may actually need to encourage entropy (in some places) in order to develop the agility to respond to change – effectively and without making any unnecessary long term assumptions.

So, if indeed the world is evolving to such a state, what can enterprise architects do to help their own organizations become successful social businesses (social governments – whatever)?

Enterprise Architecture is a practice that is founded in communication. To support and add value to that communication we have developed analysis methods and frameworks, which help us model what we learn and, in turn, communicate the results. Enterprise Architects work across organizations to understand how the activities of the participants relate to the strategy of the organization and how the performance of each person/group’s activities can optimally support and reinforce everyone else’s. We don’t do their work for them and don’t, if we do our work properly, have any sectional interests. We are the ultimate generalists, specialized in bringing together all those aspects, in which other people are the experts. We’re therefore ideally placed to facilitate the development of a unified vision and a complementary set of practices. OK, that sounds a bit idealistic. We know reality is never perfect but, if we don’t have ideals, we’d be hypocrites to be doing this work anyway. Pragmatism and ideals can be a positive combination.

Yes, there’s plenty of work to do to adapt our models to this new reality. Our goals, the things we try to achieve with EA will not be different. In some significant aspects, the results will be – if only because of the scope and diversity of the enterprise. We’ll certainly need to produce some good example EA artifacts to show what these results will look like. I can see an obvious impact in business architecture and in governance – most likely other areas too. But the issues faced in governance may be similar to those being tackled by The Open Group’s Cloud Governance project. And business architecture is long due for expansion outside of the single organization, so there’s synergy there as well. We can also look outside of our own community for inspiration – in the area of complexity theory, in business modeling, in material about innovation and strategy development and in economic and even political thinking about social business.

We’ll also be faced with organizational challenges. EA has for too long and too often been seen as the property of the IT department. That’s always been a problem anyway, but to face the challenges of social business, EA must avoid the slightest whiff of sectional interest and IT centrism. And, ironically, the best hope for the IT department in this scary new world may come from letting go of what it does not need to control and taking on a new role as a positive enabler of change.

There could hardly be a more appropriate time to be working on TOGAF Next. What an opportunity!

Stuart Boardman is a Senior Business Consultant with KPN where he co-leads the Enterprise Architecture practice as well as the Cloud Computing solutions group. He is co-lead of The Open Group Cloud Computing Work Group’s Security for the Cloud and SOA project and a founding member of both The Open Group Cloud Computing Work Group and The Open Group SOA Work Group. Stuart is the author of publications by the Information Security Platform (PvIB) in The Netherlands and of his previous employer, CGI. He is a frequent speaker at conferences on the topics of Cloud, SOA, and Identity. 

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by | January 17, 2012 · 1:19 PM

Capgemini’s CTO on How Cloud Computing Exposes the Duality Between IT and Business Transformation

By Dana Gardner, Interarbor Solutions

This BriefingsDirect thought leadership interview comes in conjunction with The Open Group Conference this month in San Francisco.

The conference will focus on how IT and enterprise architecture support enterprise transformation. Speakers in conference events will also explore the latest in service oriented architecture (SOA), cloud computing, and security.

We’re now joined by one of the main speakers, Andy Mulholland, the Global Chief Technology Officer and Corporate Vice President at Capgemini. In 2009, Andy was voted one of the top 25 most influential CTOs in the world by InfoWorld. And in 2010, his CTO Blog was voted best blog for business managers and CIOs for the third year running by Computer Weekly.

Capgemini is about to publish a white paper on cloud computing. It draws distinctions between what cloud means to IT, and what it means to business — while examining the complex dual relationship between the two.

As a lead-in to his Open Group conference presentation on the transformed enterprise, Andy draws on the paper and further drills down on one of the decade’s hottest technology and business trends, cloud computing, and how it impacts business and IT. The interview is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. The full podcast can be found here.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Why do business people think they have a revolution on their hands, while IT people look cloud computing as an evolution of infrastructure efficiency?

Mulholland: We define the role of IT and give it the responsibility and the accountability in the business in a way that is quite strongly related to internal practice. It’s all about how we manage the company’s transactions, how we reduce the cost, how we automate business process,and generally try to make our company a more efficient internal operator.

When you look at cloud computing through that set of lenses, you’re going to see … the technologies from cloud computing, principally virtualization, [as] ways to improve how you deliver the current server-centric, application-centric environment.

However, business people … reflect on it in terms of the change in society and the business world, which we all ought to recognize because that is our world, around the way we choose what we buy, how we choose to do business with people, how we search more, and how we’ve even changed that attitude.

Changed our ways

There’s a whole list of things that we simply just don’t do anymore because we’ve changed the way we choose to buy a book, the way we choose and listen to music and lots of other things.

So we see this as a revolution in the market or, more particularly, a revolution in how cloud can serve in the market, because everybody uses some form of technology.

So then the question is not the role of the IT department and the enterprise — it’s the role technology should be playing in their extended enterprise in doing business.

Gardner: What do we need to start doing differently?

Mulholland: Let’s go to a conversation this morning with a client. It’s always interesting to touch reality. This particular client is looking at the front end of a complex ecosystem around travel, and was asked this standard question by our account director: Do you have a business case for the work we’re discussing?

The reply from the CEO is very interesting. He fixed him with a very cold glare and he said, “If you were able to have 20 percent more billable hours without increasing your cost structure, would you be bothered to even think about the business case?”

The answer in that particular case was they were talking about 10,000 more travel instances or more a year — with no increase in their cost structure. In other words, their whole idea was there was nothing to do with cost in it. Their argument was in revenue increase, market share increase, and they thought that they would make better margins, because it would actually decrease their cost base or spread it more widely.

That’s the whole purpose of this revolution and that’s the purpose the business schools are always pushing, when they talk about innovative business models. It means innovate your business model to look at the market again from the perspective of getting into new markets, getting increased revenue, and maybe designing things that make more money.

Using technology externally

We’re always hooked on this idea that we’ve used technology very successfully internally, but now we should be asking the question about how we’re using technology externally when the population as a whole uses that as their primary method of deciding what they’re going to buy, how they’re going to buy it, when they’re going to buy it, and lots of other questions.

… A popular book recently has been The Power of Pull, and the idea is that we’re really seeing a decentralization of the front office in order to respond to and follow the market and the opportunities and the events in very different ways.

The Power of Pull says that I do what my market is asking me and I design business process or capabilities to be rapidly orchestrated through the front office around where things want to go, and I have linkage points, application programming interface (API) points, where I take anything significant and transfer it back.

But the real challenge is — and it was put to me today in the client discussion — that their business was designed around 1970 computer systems, augmented slowly around that, and they still felt that. Today, their market and their expectations of the industry that they’re in were that they would be designed around the way people were using their products and services and the events and that they had to make that change.

To do that, they’re transformed in the organization, and that’s where we start to spot the difference. We start to spot the idea that your own staff, your customers, and other suppliers are all working externally in information, process, and services accessible to all on an Internet market or architecture.

So when we talk about business architecture, it’s as relevant today as it ever was in terms of interpreting a business.

Set of methodologies

But when we start talking about architecture, The Open Group Architectural Framework (TOGAF) is a set of methodologies on the IT side — the closed-coupled state for a designed set of principles to client-server type systems. In this new model, when we talk about clouds, mobility, and people traveling around and connecting by wireless, etc., we have a stateless loosely coupled environment.

The whole purpose of The Open Group is, in fact, to help devise new ways for being able to architect methods to deliver that. That’s what stands behind the phrase, “a transformed enterprise.”

… If we go back to the basic mission of The Open Group, which is boundarylessness of this information flow, the boundary has previously been defined by a computer system updating another computer system in another company around traditional IT type procedural business flow.

Now, we’re talking about the idea that the information flow is around an ecosystem in an unstructured way. Not a structured file-to-file type transfer, not a structured architecture of who does what, when, and how, but the whole change model in this is unstructured.

Gardner: It’s important to point out here, Andy, that the stakes are relatively high. Who in the organization can be the change agent that can make that leap between the duality view of cloud that IT has, and these business opportunists?

Mulholland: The CEOs are quite noticeably reading the right articles, hearing the right information from business schools, etc., and they’re getting this picture that they’re going to have new business models and new capabilities.

So the drive end is not hard. The problem that is usually encountered is that the IT department’s definition and role interferes with them being able to play the role they want.

What we’re actually looking for is the idea that IT, as we define it today, is some place else. You have to accept that it exists, it will exist, and it’s hugely important. So please don’t take those principles and try to apply them outside.

The real question here is when you find those people who are doing the work outside — and I’ve yet to find any company where it hasn’t been the case — and the question should be how can we actually encourage and manage that innovation sensibly and successfully?

What I mean by that is that if everybody goes off and does their own thing, once again, we’ll end up with a broken company. Why? Because their whole purpose as an enterprises is to leverage success rapidly. If someone is very successful over there, you really need to know, and you need to leverage that again as rapidly as you can to run the rest of the organization. If it doesn’t work, you need to stop it quickly.

Changing roles

In models of the capabilities of that, the question is where is the government structure? So we hear titles like Chief Innovation Officer, again, slightly surprising how it may come up. But we see the model coming both ways. There are reforming CIOs for sure, who have recognized this and are changing their role and position accordingly, sometimes formally, sometimes informally.

The other way around, there are people coming from other parts of the business, taking the title and driving them. I’ve seen Chief Strategy Officers taking the role. I’ve seen the head of sales and marketing taking the role.

Certainly, recognizing the technology possibilities should be coming from the direction of the technology capabilities within the current IT department. The capability of what that means might be coming differently. So it’s a very interesting balance at the moment, and we don’t know quite the right answer.

What I do know is that it’s happening, and the quick-witted CIOs are understanding that it’s a huge opportunity for them to fix their role and embrace a new area, and a new sense of value that they can bring to their organization.

Gardner: Returning to the upcoming Capgemini white paper, it adds a sense of urgency at the end on how to get started. It suggests that you appoint a leader, but a leader first for the inside-out element of cloud and transformation and then a second leader, a separate leader perhaps, for that outside-in or reflecting the business transformation and the opportunity for what’s going on in the external business and markets. It also suggests a strategic road map that involves both business and technology, and then it suggests getting a pilot going.

How does this transition become something that you can manage?

Mulholland: The question is do you know who is responsible. If you don’t, you’d better figure out how you’re going to make someone responsible, because in any situation, someone has to be deciding what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it.

Having defined that, there are very different business drivers, as well as different technology drivers, between the two. Clearly, whoever takes those roles will reflect a very different way that they will have to run that element. So a duality is recognized in that comment.

On the other hand, no business can survive by going off in half-a-dozen directions at once. You won’t have the money. You won’t have the brand. You won’t have anything you’d like. It’s simply not feasible.

So, the object of the strategic roadmap is to reaffirm the idea of what kind of business we’re trying to be and do. That’s the glimpse of what we want to achieve.

There has to be a strategy. Otherwise, you’ll end up with way too much decentralization and people making up their own version of the strategy, which they can fairly easily do and fairly easily mount from someone else’s cloud to go and do it today.

So the purpose of the duality is to make sure that the two roles, the two different groups of technology, the two different capabilities they reflect to the organization, are properly addressed, properly managed, and properly have a key authority figure in charge of them.

Enablement model

The business strategy is to make sure that the business knows how the enablement model that these two offer them is capable of being directed to where the shareholders will make money out of the business, because that is ultimately that success factor they’re looking for to drive them forward.

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If you are interested in attending The Open Group’s upcoming conference, please register here: http://www3.opengroup.org/event/open-group-conference-san-francisco/registration

Dana Gardner is president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, an enterprise IT analysis, market research, and consulting firm. Gardner, a leading identifier of software and cloud productivity trends and new IT business growth opportunities, honed his skills and refined his insights as an industry analyst, pundit, and news editor covering the emerging software development and enterprise infrastructure arenas for the last 18 years.

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by | January 11, 2012 · 1:24 PM

MIT’s Ross on How Enterprise Architecture and IT More Than Ever Lead to Business Transformation

By Dana Gardner, Interarbor Solutions

This BriefingsDirect thought leadership interview comes in conjunction with The Open Group Conference this month in San Francisco.

The conference will focus on how IT and enterprise architecture support enterprise transformation. Speakers in conference events will also explore the latest in service oriented architecture (SOA), cloud computing, and security.

We’re now joined by of the main speakers, Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research. Jeanne studies how firms develop competitive advantage through the implementation and reuse of digitized platforms.

She is also the co-author of three books: IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results, Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution, and IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go from Pain to Gain.

As a lead-in to her Open Group presentation on how adoption of enterprise architecture (EA) leads to greater efficiencies and better business agility, Ross explains how enterprise architects have helped lead the way to successful business transformations. The interview is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. The full podcast can be found here.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: How you measure or determine that enterprise architects and their practices are intrinsic to successful business transformations?

Ross: That’s a great question. Today, there remains kind of a leap of faith in recognizing that companies that are well-architected will, in fact, perform better, partly because you can be well-architected and perform badly. Or if we look at companies that are very young and have no competitors, they can be very poorly architected and achieve quite remarkably in the marketplace.

But what we can ascribe to architecture is that when companies have competition, then they can establish any kind of performance target they want, whether it’s faster revenue growth or better profitability, and then architect themselves so they can achieve their goals. Then, we can monitor that.

We do have evidence in repeated case studies of companies that set goals, defined an architecture, started to build the capabilities associated with that architecture, and did indeed improve their performance. We have wonderful case study results that should be very reaffirming. I accept that they are not conclusive.

Architectural maturity

We also have statistical support in some of the work we’ve done that shows that high performers in our sample of 102 companies, in fact, had greater architecture maturity. They had deployed a number of practices associated with good architecture.

Gardner: Is there something that’s new about this, rather than just trying to reengineer something?

Ross: Yes, the thing we’re learning about enterprise architecture is that there’s a cultural shift that takes place in an organization, when it commits to doing business in a new way, and that cultural shift starts with abandoning a culture of heroes and accepting a culture of discipline.

Nobody wants to get rid of the heroes in their company. Heroes are people who see a problem and solve it. But we do want to get past heroes sub-optimizing. What companies traditionally did before they started thinking about what architecture would mean, is they relied on individuals to do what seemed best and that clearly can sub-optimize in an environment that increasingly is global and requires things like a single face to the customer.

We also have statistical support in some of the work we’ve done that shows that high performers in our sample of 102 companies, in fact, had greater architecture maturity. They had deployed a number of practices associated with good architecture.

Gardner: Is there something that’s new about this, rather than just trying to reengineer something?

Ross: Yes, the thing we’re learning about enterprise architecture is that there’s a cultural shift that takes place in an organization, when it commits to doing business in a new way, and that cultural shift starts with abandoning a culture of heroes and accepting a culture of discipline.

Nobody wants to get rid of the heroes in their company. Heroes are people who see a problem and solve it. But we do want to get past heroes sub-optimizing. What companies traditionally did before they started thinking about what architecture would mean, is they relied on individuals to do what seemed best and that clearly can sub-optimize in an environment that increasingly is global and requires things like a single face to the customer.

We really just need architecture to pull out unnecessary cost and to enable desirable reusability. And the architect is typically going to be the person representing that enterprise view and helping everyone understand the benefits of understanding that enterprise view, so that everybody who can easily or more easily see the local view is constantly working with architects to balance those two requirements.

Gardner: Is this a particularly good time, from your vantage point, to undertake enterprise architecture?

Ross: It’s a great time for most companies. There will be exceptions that I’ll talk about in a minute. One thing we learned early on in the research is that companies who were best at adopting architecture and implementing it effectively had cost pressures. What happens when you have cost pressures is that you’re forced to make tough decisions.

If you have all the money in the world, you’re not forced to make tough decisions. Architecture is all about making tough decisions, understanding your tradeoffs, and recognizing that you’re going to get some things that you want and you are going to sacrifice others.

If you don’t see that, if you just say, “We’re going to solve that by spending more money,” it becomes nearly impossible to become architected. This is why investment banks are invariably very badly architected, and most people in investment banks are very aware of that. It’s just very hard to do anything other than say, “If that’s important to us, let’s spend more money and let’s get it.” One thing you can’t get by spending more money is discipline, and architecture is very tightly related to discipline.

Tough decisions

In a tough economy, when competition is increasingly global and marketplaces are shifting, this ability to make tough decisions is going to be essential. Opportunities to save costs are going to be really valued, and architecture invariably helps companies save money. The ability to reuse, and thus rapidly seize the next related business opportunity, is also going to be highly valued.

The thing you have to be careful of is that if you see your markets disappearing, if your product is outdated, or your whole industry is being redefined, as we have seen in things like media, you have to be ready to innovate. Architecture can restrict your innovative gene, by saying, “Wait, wait, wait. We want to slow down. We want to do things on our platform.” That can be very dangerous, if you are really facing disruptive technology or market changes.

So you always have to have that eye out there that says, “When is what we built that’s stable actually constraining us too much? When is it preventing important innovation?” For a lot of architects, that’s going to be tough, because you start to love the architecture, the standards, and the discipline. You love what you’ve created, but if it isn’t right for the market you’re facing, you have to be ready to let it go and go seize the next opportunity.

Gardner: Perhaps this environment is the best of all worlds, because we have that discipline on the costs which forces hard decisions, as you say. We also have a lot of these innovative IT trends that would almost force you to look at doing things differently. I’m thinking again of cloud, mobile, the big data issues, and even social-media types of effects.

Ross: Absolutely. We should all look at it that way and say, “What a wonderful world we live in.” One of the companies that I find quite remarkable in their ability to, on the one hand, embrace discipline and architecture, and on the other hand, constantly innovate, is USAA. I’m sure I’ll talk about them a little bit at the conference.

This is a company that just totally understands the importance of discipline around customer service. They’re off the charts in their customer satisfaction.

They’re a financial services institution. Most financial services institutions just drool over USAA’s customer satisfaction ratings, but they’ve done this by combining this idea of discipline around the customer. We have a single customer file. We have an enterprise view of that customer. We constantly standardize those practices and processes that will ensure that we understand the customer and we deliver the products and services they need. They have enormous discipline around these things.

Simultaneously, they have people working constantly around innovation. They were the first company to see the need for this deposit with your iPhone. Take a picture of your check and it’s automatically deposited into your account. They were nearly a year ahead of the next company that came up with that service.

The way they see it is that for any new technology that comes out, our customer will want to use it. We’ve got to be there the day after the technology comes out. They obviously haven’t been able to achieve that, but that’s their goal. If they can make deals with R&D companies that are coming up with new technologies, they’re going to make them, so that they can be ready with their product when the thing actually becomes commercial.

So it’s certainly possible for a company to be both innovative and responsive to what’s going on in the technology world and disciplined and cost effective around customer service, order-to-cash, and those other underlying critical requirements in your organization. But it’s not easy, and that’s why USAA is quite remarkable. They’ve pulled it off and they are a lesson for many other companies.

Gardner: Is The Open Group a good forum for your message and your research, and if so, why?

Ross: The Open Group is great for me, because there is so much serious thinking in The Open Group about what architecture is, how it adds value, and how we do it well. For me to touch base with people in The Open Group is really valuable, and for me to touch base to share my research and hear the push back, the debate, or the value add is perfect, because these are people who are living it every day.

Major themes

Gardner: Are there any other major themes that you’ll be discussing at the conference coming up that you might want to share with us?

Ross: One thing we have observed in our cases that is more and more important to architects is that the companies are struggling more than we realized with using their platforms well.

I’m not sure that architects or people in IT always see this. You build something that’s phenomenally good and appropriate for the business and then you just assume, that if you give them a little training, they’ll use it well.

That’s actually been a remarkable struggle for organizations. One of our research projects right now is called “Working Smarter on Your Digitized Platform.” When we go out, we find there aren’t very many companies that have come anywhere close to leveraging their platforms the way they might have imagined and certainly the way an architect would have imagined.

It’s harder than we thought. It requires persistent coaching. It’s not about training, but persistent coaching. It requires enormous clarity of what the organization is trying to do, and organizations change fast. Clarity is a lot harder to achieve than we think it ought to be.

The message for architects would be: here you are trying to get really good at being a great architect. To add value to your organization, you actually have to understand one more thing: how effectively are people in your company adopting the capabilities and leveraging them effectively? At some point, the value add of the architecture is diminished by the fact that people don’t get it. They don’t understand what they should be able to do.

We’re going to see architects spending a little more time understanding what their leadership is capable of and what capabilities they’ll be able to leverage in the organization, as opposed to which on a rational basis seem like a really good idea.

Getting started

Gardner: When you’re an organization and you’ve decided that you do want to transform and take advantage of unique opportunities for either technical disruption or market discipline, how do you go about getting more structure, more of an architecture?

Ross: That’s idiosyncratic to some extent, because in your dream world, what happens is that the CEO announces, “This is what we are going to be five years from now. This is how we are going to operate and I expect everyone to get on board.” The vision is clear and the commitment is clear. Then the architects can just say, and most architects are totally capable of this, “Oh, well then, here are the capabilities we need to build. Let’s just go build them and then we’ll live happily ever after.”

The problem is that’s rarely the way you get to start. Invariably, the CEO is looking at the need for some acquisitions, some new markets, and all kinds of pressures. The last thing you’re getting is some clarity around the vision of an operating model that would define your critical architectural capabilities.

What ends up happening instead is architects recognize key business leaders who understand the need for, reused standardization, process discipline, whatever it is, and they’re very pragmatic about it. They say, “What do you need here to develop an enterprise view of the customer, or what’s limiting your ability to move into the next market?”

And they have to pragmatically develop what the organization can use, as opposed to defining the organizational vision and then the big picture view of the enterprise architecture.

So in practice, it’s a much more pragmatic process than what we would imagine when we, for example, write books on how to do enterprise architecture. The best architects are listening very hard to who is asking for what kind of capability. When they see real demand and real leadership around certain enterprise capabilities, they focus their attention on addressing those, in the context of what they realize will be a bigger picture over time.

They can already see the unfolding bigger picture, but there’s no management commitment yet. So they stick to the capabilities that they are confident the organization will use. That’s the way they get the momentum to build. That is more art than science and it really distinguishes the most successful architects.

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If you are interested in attending The Open Group’s upcoming conference, please register here: http://www3.opengroup.org/event/open-group-conference-san-francisco/registration

Dana Gardner is president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, an enterprise IT analysis, market research, and consulting firm. Gardner, a leading identifier of software and cloud productivity trends and new IT business growth opportunities, honed his skills and refined his insights as an industry analyst, pundit, and news editor covering the emerging software development and enterprise infrastructure arenas for the last 18 years.

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by | January 9, 2012 · 1:47 PM

SF Conference to Explore Architecture Trends

By The Open Group Conference Team

In addition to exploring the theme of “Enterprise Transformation,” speakers at The Open Group San Francisco conference in January will explore a number of other trends related to enterprise architecture and the profession, including trends in service oriented architectures and business architecture. 

The debate about the role of EA in the development of high-level business strategy is a long running one. EA clearly contributes to business strategy, but does it formulate, plan or execute on business strategy?  If the scope of EA is limited to EA alone, it could have a diminutive role in business strategy and Enterprise Transformation going forward.

EA professionals will have the opportunity to discuss and debate these questions and hear from peers about their practical experiences, including the following tracks:

  • Establishing Value Driven EA as the Enterprise Embarks on Transformation (EA & Enterprise Transformation Track)  - Madhav Naidu, Lead Enterprise Architedt, Ciena Corp., US; and Mark Temple, Chief Architect, Ciena Corp.
  • Building an Enterprise Architecture Practice Foundation for Enterprise Transformation Execution  (EA & Business Innovation Track) – Frank Chen, Senior Manager & Principal Enterprise Architect, Cognizant, US
  • Death of IT: Rise of the Machines (Business Innovation & Technological Disruption: The Challenges to EA Track) –  Mans Bhuller, Senior Director, Oracle Corporation, US
  • Business Architecture Profession and Case Studies  (Business Architecture Track) – Mieke Mahakena, Capgemini,; and Peter Haviland, Chief Architect/Head of Business Architecture, Ernst & Young
  • Constructing the Architecture of an Agile Enterprise Using the MSBI Method (Agile Enterprise Architecture Track) – Nick Malike, Senior Principal Enterprise Architect, Microsoft Corporation, US
  • There’s a SEA Change in Your Future: How Sustainable EA Enables Business Success in Times of Disruptive Change (Sustainable EA Track)  – Leo Laverdure & Alex Conn, Managing Partners, SBSA Partners LLC, US
  • The Realization of SOA’s Using the SOA Reference Architecture  (Tutorials) – Nikhil Kumar, President, Applied Technology Solutions, US
  • SOA Governance: Thinking Beyond Services (SOA Track) – Jed Maczuba, Senior Manager, Accenture, US

In addition, a number of conference tracks will explore issues and trends related to the enterprise architecture profession and role of enterprise architects within organizations.  Tracks addressing professional concerns include:

  • EA: Professionalization or Marketing Needed? (Professional Development Track)  - Peter Kuppen, Senior Manager, Deloitte Consulting, BV, Netherlands
  • Implementing Capabilities With an Architecture Practice (Setting up a Successful EA Practice Track)  – Mike Jacobs, Director and Principal Architect, OmptumInsight; and Joseph May, Director, Architecture Center of Excellence, OmptumInsight
  • Gaining and Retaining Stakeholder Buy-In: The Key to a Successful EA Practice Practice (Setting up a Successful EA Practice Track)   – Russ Gibfried, Enterprise Architect, CareFusion Corporation, US
  • The Virtual Enterprise Architecture Team (Nature & Role of the Enterprise Architecture) – Nicholas Hill, Principal Enterprise Architect, Consulting Services, FSI, Infosys; and Musharal Mughal, Director of EA, Manulife Financials, Canada

 Our Tutorials track will also provide practical guidance for attendees interested in learning more about how to implement architectures within organizations.  Topics will include tutorials on subjects such as TOGAF®, Archimate®, Service Oriented Architectures,  and architecture methods and techniques.

For more information on EA conference tracks, please visit the conference program on our website.

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by | December 23, 2011 · 12:30 AM

2012 Open Group Predictions, Vol. 2

By The Open Group

Continuing on the theme of predictions, here are a few more, which focus on enterprise architecture, business architecture, general IT and Open Group events in 2012.

Enterprise Architecture – The Industry

By Leonard Fehskens, VP of Skills and Capabilities

Looking back at 2011 and looking forward to 2012, I see growing stress within the EA community as both the demands being placed on it and the diversity of opinions within it increase. While this stress is not likely to fracture the community, it is going to make it much more difficult for both enterprise architects and the communities they serve to make sense of EA in general, and its value proposition in particular.

As I predicted around this time last year, the conventional wisdom about EA continues to spin its wheels.  At the same time, there has been a bit more progress at the leading edge than I had expected or hoped for. The net effect is that the gap between the conventional wisdom and the leading edge has widened. I expect this to continue through the next year as progress at the leading edge is something like the snowball rolling downhill, and newcomers to the discipline will pronounce that it’s obvious the Earth is both flat and the center of the universe.

What I had not expected is the vigor with which the loosely defined concept of business architecture has been adopted as the answer to the vexing challenge of “business/IT alignment.” The big idea seems to be that the enterprise comprises “the business” and IT, and enterprise architecture comprises business architecture and IT architecture. We already know how to do the IT part, so if we can just figure out the business part, we’ll finally have EA down to a science. What’s troubling is how much of the EA community does not see this as an inherently IT-centric perspective that will not win over the “business community.” The key to a truly enterprise-centric concept of EA lies inside that black box labeled “the business” – a black box that accounts for 95% or more of the enterprise.

As if to compensate for this entrenched IT-centric perspective, the EA community has lately adopted the mantra of “enterprise transformation”, a dangerous strategy that risks promising even more when far too many EA efforts have been unable to deliver on the promises they have already made.

At the same time, there is a growing interest in professionalizing the discipline, exemplified by the membership of the Association of Enterprise Architects (AEA) passing 20,000, TOGAF® 9 certifications passing 10,000, and the formation of the Federation of Enterprise Architecture Professional Organizations (FEAPO). The challenge that we face in 2012 and beyond is bringing order to the increasing chaos that characterizes the EA space. The biggest question looming seems to be whether this should be driven by IT. If so, will we be honest about this IT focus and will the potential for EA to become a truly enterprise-wide capability be realized?

Enterprise Architecture – The Profession

By Steve Nunn, COO of The Open Group and CEO of the Association of Enterprise Architects

It’s an exciting time for enterprise architecture, both as an industry and as a profession. There are an abundance of trends in EA, but I wanted to focus on three that have emerged and will continue to evolve in 2012 and beyond.

  • A Defined Career Path for Enterprise Architects: Today, there is no clear career path for the enterprise architect. I’ve heard this from college students, IT and business professionals and current EAs. Up until now, the skills necessary to succeed and the roles within an organization that an EA can and should fill have not been defined. It’s imperative that we determine the skill sets EAs need and the path for EAs to acquire these skills in a linear progression throughout their career. Expect this topic to become top priority in 2012.
  • Continued EA Certification Adoption: Certification will continue to grow as EAs seek ways to differentiate themselves within the industry and to employers. Certifications and memberships through professional bodies such as the Association of Enterprise Architects will offer value to members and employers alike by identifying competent and capable architects. This growth will also be supported by EA certification adoption in emerging markets like India and China, as those countries continue to explore ways to build value and quality for current and perspective clients, and to establish more international credibility.
  • Greater Involvement from the Business: As IT investments become business driven, business executives controlling corporate strategy will need to become more involved in EA and eventually drive the process. Business executive involvement will be especially helpful when outsourcing IT processes, such as Cloud Computing. Expect to see greater interest from executives and business schools that will implement coursework and training to reflect this shift, as well as increased discussion on the value of business architecture.

Business Architecture – Part 2

By Kevin Daley, IBM and Vice-Chair of The Open Group Business Forum

Several key technologies have reached a tipping point in 2011 that will move them out of the investigation and validation by enterprise architects and into the domain of strategy and realization for business architects. Five areas where business architects will be called upon for participation and effort in 2012 are related to:

  • Cloud: This increasingly adopted and disruptive technology will help increase the speed of development and change. The business architect will be called upon to ensure the strategic relevancy of transformation in a repeatable fashion as cycle times and rollouts happen faster.
  • Social Networking / Mobile Computing: Prevalent consumer usage, global user adoption and improvements in hardware and security make this a trend that cannot be ignored. The business architect will help develop new strategies as organizations strive for new markets and broader demographic reach.
  • Internet of Things: This concept from 2000 is reaching critical mass as more and more devices become communicative. The business architect will be called on to facilitate the conversation and design efforts between operational efforts and technologies managing the flood of new and usable information.
  • Big Data and Business Intelligence: Massive amounts of previously untapped data are being exposed, analyzed and made insightful and useful. The business architect will be utilized to help contain the complexity of business possibilities while identifying tactical areas where the new insights can be integrated into existing technologies to optimize automation and business process domains.
  • ERP Resurgence and Smarter Software: Software purchasing looks to continue its 2011 trend towards broader, more intuitive and feature-rich software and applications.  The business architect will be called upon to identify and help drive getting the maximum amount of operational value and output from these platforms to both preserve and extend organizational differentiation.

The State of IT

By Dave Lounsbury, CTO

What will have a profound effect on the IT industry throughout 2012 are the twin horses of mobility and consumerization, both of which are galloping at full tilt within the IT industry right now. Key to these trends are the increased use of personal devices, as well as favorite consumer Cloud services and social networks, which drive a rapidly growing comfort among end users with both data and computational power being everywhere. This comfort brings a level of expectations to end users who will increasingly want to control how they access and use their data, and with what devices. The expectation of control and access will be increasingly brought from home to the workplace.

This has profound implications for core IT organizations. There will be less reliance on core IT services, and with that an increased expectation of “I’ll buy the services, you show me know to knit them in” as the prevalent user approach to IT – thus requiring increased attention to use of standards conformance. IT departments will change from being the only service providers within organizations to being a guiding force when it comes to core business processes, with IT budgets being impacted. I see a rapid tipping point in this direction in 2012.

What does this mean for corporate data? The matters of scale that have been a part of IT—the overarching need for good architecture, security, standards and governance—will now apply to a wide range of users and their devices and services. Security issues will loom larger. Data, apps and hardware are coming from everywhere, and companies will need to develop criteria for knowing whether systems are robust, secure and trustworthy. Governments worldwide will take a close look at this in 2012, but industry must take the lead to keep up with the pace of technology evolution, such as The Open Group and its members have done with the OTTF standard.

Open Group Events in 2012

By Patty Donovan, VP of Membership and Events

In 2012, we will continue to connect with members globally through all mediums available to us – our quarterly conferences, virtual and regional events and social media. Through coordination with our local partners in Brazil, China, France, Japan, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, we’ve been able to increase our global footprint and connect members and non-members who may not have been able to attend the quarterly conferences with the issues facing today’s IT professionals. These events in conjunction with our efforts in social media has led to a rise in member participation and helped further develop The Open Group community, and we hope to have continued growth in the coming year and beyond.

We’re always open to new suggestions, so if you have a creative idea on how to connect members, please let me know! Also, please be sure to attend the upcoming Open Group Conference in San Francisco, which is taking place on January 30 through February 3. The conference will address enterprise transformation as well as other key issues in 2012 and beyond.

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by | December 20, 2011 · 12:30 AM

Save the Date—The Open Group Conference San Francisco!

By Patty Donovan, The Open Group

It’s that time again to start thinking ahead to The Open Group’s first conference of 2012 to be held in San Francisco, January 30 – February 3, 2012. Not only do we have a great venue for the event, the Intercontinental Mark Hopkins (home of the famous “Top of the Mark” sky lounge—with amazing views of all of San Francisco!), but we have stellar line up for our winter conference centered on the theme of Enterprise Transformation.

Enterprise Transformation is a theme that is increasingly being used by organizations of all types to represent the change processes they implement in response to internal and external business drivers. Enterprise Architecture (EA) can be a means to Enterprise Transformation, but most enterprises today because EA is still largely limited to the IT department and transformation must go beyond the IT department to be successful. The San Francisco conference will focus on the role that both IT and EA can play within the Enterprise Transformation process, including the following:

  • The differences between EA and Enterprise Transformation and how they relate  to one another
  • The use of EA to facilitate Enterprise Transformation
  • How EA can be used to create a foundation for Enterprise Transformation that the Board and business-line managers can understand and use to their advantage
  • How EA facilitates transformation within IT, and how does such transformation support the transformation of the enterprise as a whole
  • How EA can help the enterprise successfully adapt to “disruptive technologies” such as Cloud Computing and ubiquitous mobile access

In addition, we will be featuring a line-up of keynotes by some of the top industry leaders to discuss Enterprise Transformation, as well as themes around our regular tracks of Enterprise Architecture and Professional Certification, Cloud Computing and Cybersecurity. Keynoting at the conference will be:

  • Joseph Menn, author and cybersecurity correspondent for the Financial Times (Keynote: What You’re Up Against: Mobsters, Nation-States and Blurry Lines)
  • Celso Guiotoko, Corporate Vice President and CIO, Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. (Keynote: How Enterprise Architecture is helping NISSAN IT Transformation)
  • Jeanne W. Ross, Director & Principal Research Scientist, MIT Center for Information Systems Research (Keynote: The Enterprise Architect: Architecting Business Success)
  • Lauren C. States, Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Computing and Growth Initiatives, IBM Corp. (Keynote: Making Business Drive IT Transformation Through Enterprise Architecture)
  • Andy Mulholland, Chief Global Technical Officer, Capgemini (Keynote: The Transformed Enterprise)
  • William Rouse, Executive Director, Tennenbaum Institute at Georgia Institute of Technology (Keynote: Enterprise Transformation: An Architecture-Based Approach)

For more on the conference tracks or to register, please visit our conference registration page. And stay tuned throughout the next month for more sneak peeks leading up to The Open Group Conference San Francisco!

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by | December 19, 2011 · 3:30 AM

2012 Open Group Predictions, Vol. 1

By The Open Group

Foreword

By Allen Brown, CEO

2011 was a big year for The Open Group, thanks to the efforts of our members and our staff – you all deserve a very big thank you. There have been so many big achievements, that to list them all here would mean we would never get to our predictions. Significantly though, The Open Group continues to grow and this year the number of enterprise members passed the 400 mark which means that around 30,000 people are involved, some more so than others, from all over the world.

Making predictions is always risky but we thought it might be fun anyway. Here are three trends that will wield great influence on IT in 2012 and beyond:

  • This year we experienced the consumerization of IT accelerating the pace of change for the enterprise at an astonishing rate as business users embraced new technologies that transformed their organizations. As this trend continues in 2012, the enterprise architect will play a critical role in supporting this change and enabling the business to realize their goals.
  • Enterprise architecture will continue its maturity in becoming a recognized profession. As the profession matures, employers of enterprise architects and other IT professionals, for that matter, will increasingly look for industry recognized certifications.
  • As globalization continues, security and compliance will be increasing issues for companies delivering products or services and there will be a growing spotlight on what might be inside IT products. Vendors will be expected to warrant that the products they purchase and integrate into their own products come from a trusted source and that their own processes can be trusted in order not to introduce potential threats to their customers. At the same time, customers will be increasingly sensitive to the security and dependability of their IT assets. To address this situation, security will continue to be designed in from the outset and be tightly coupled with enterprise architecture.

In addition to my predictions, Other Open Group staff members also wanted to share their predictions for 2012 with you:

Security

By Jim Hietala, VP of Security

Cloud security in 2012 becomes all about point solutions to address specific security pain points. Customers are realizing that to achieve an acceptable level of security, whether for IaaS, SaaS, or PaaS, they need to apply controls in addition to the native platform controls from the Cloud service provider. In 2012, this will manifest as early Cloud security technologies target specific and narrow security functionality gaps. Specific areas where we see this playing out include data encryption, data loss prevention, identity and access management, and others.

Cloud

By Chris Harding, Director of Interoperability

There is a major trend towards shared computing resources that are “on the Cloud” – accessed by increasingly powerful and mobile personal computing devices but decoupled from the users.

This may bring some much-needed economic growth in 2012, but history shows that real growth can only come from markets based on standards. Cloud portability and interoperability standards will enable development of re-usable components as commodity items, but the need for them is not yet appreciated. And, even if the vendors wanted these standards for Cloud Computing, they do not yet have the experience to create good ones.  But, by the end of the year, we should understand Cloud Computing better and will perhaps have made a start on the standardization that will lead to growth in the years ahead.

Here are some more Cloud predictions from my colleagues in The Open Group Cloud Work Group: http://blog.opengroup.org/2011/12/19/cloud-computing-predictions-for-2012/

Business Architecture

By Steve Philp, Professional Certification

There are a number of areas for 2012 where Business Architects will be called upon to engage in transforming the business and applying technologies such as Cloud Computing, social networking and big data. Therefore, the need to have competent Business Architects is greater than ever. This year organizations have been recruiting and developing Business Architects and the profession as a whole is now starting to take shape. But how do you establish who is a practicing Business Architect?

In response to requests from our membership, next year The Open Group will incorporate a Business Architecture stream into The Open Group Certified Architect (Open CA) program. There has already been significant interest in this stream from both organizations and practitioners alike. This is because Open CA is a skills and experience based program that recognizes, at different levels, those individuals who are performing in a Business Architecture role. I believe this initiative will further help to develop the profession over the next few years and especially in 2012.

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