Going about the Business of IT

Governance and Control - Challenges and Approaches in Service Oriented Architectures - Published paper in SEEC 2011

2011-12-08T20:03:00.001-08:00

A couple of snaps from my presentation:

See attached link to file posted on Enterprise CIO forum

Latest Management Consulting News

2011-04-08T05:55:00.000-07:00

Finalist - IT Consultant Of The Year at the MCA Awards 2011

CAEAP : Centre for Advancement of the Enterprise Architecture Profession

2010-06-05T06:59:00.000-07:00

I have been involved with "Centre for Advancement of the Enterprise Architecture Profession" (CAEAP) an Enterprise Architecture Advocacy body for the Public, the Practice and the Profession focussing on achieving tangible business outcomes.

This body is rapidly gaining market recognition as it does not support a specific technology or framework but gives real guidance and thought leadership.

I have been leading 2 chapters for developing a Professional Practice Guide which has now officially released early abstracts to the market

Please find the attached link and the down loaded abstract for your reference

Click Link below
>>CAEAP Enterprise Architecture Professional Practice Guide

Getting Serious about Enterprise Architecture : Application of Formalisms

2009-12-01T16:23:00.000-08:00

The link between SAVARA and Enterprise Architecture

Prologue
This blog has been written to achieve the following objectives:

A clear understanding of the meaning of:

Enterprise Architecture in terms of components and inter-relationships
Best Practices around modelling methods and practices
An appreciation of:
Formal methods of enterprise modelling
Testable Architectures as an extension of Enterprise Architecture standards like The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF Version 9) or Zachmann to help clearly articulate formal descriptions for the component inter-relationships
Benefits of Testable Architectures

Setting the Scene – Standard EA Definitions

IEEE Std 1471-2000 defines Enterprise Architecture as “the systems fundamental organisation, embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and to the environment, and the principles guiding its design and evolution”

TOGAF 9 defines Enterprise Architecture as

A formal description of a system, or a detailed plan of the system at the component level, to guide its implementation (source: ISO/IEC 42010:2007)

The structure of components, their inter-relationships, and the principles and guidelines governing their design and evolution over time.

Other major definitions detail Enterprise Architecture is a set of principles, practices and processes, that defines the structure as well as operations of the enterprise and its systems for effective realisation of enterprise goals to enable an enterprise performance to be predictable, measurable and manageable

The key factor in the above definitions for enterprise architecture is the focus on principles, components and more importantly formal inter-relationships between components. Much of the architecture we see today do not emphasize on formal relationships between participating components which is brings the main problem of ambiguity and error within various architectural layers.

The problem domain around failed programmes and effort lost in extensive and often repeated testing lifecycles is primarily because of ambiguity in requirements (capture, analysis or engineering) and then ambiguity between architecture and requirements and finally the cascading effect of ambiguity between implementation and architecture

There is ambiguity because requirements are divorced from architecture and architecture is divorced from implementation. As architects we write a lot of documentation and create a lot of great diagrams.

However, how many of us have really proven that what we have written in terms of architecture is actually what is built finally? If proven, is the proof empirical or derived or formal?

While empirical or derived proofs (through various kinds of testing) are okay for simple projects with straight forward architectures, they do not water on large programmes and end up in extensive testing cycles which are often repeated and involve huge efforts and wastage of time.

As a result of ambiguity we end up with:

Poor Alignment of IT to business goals and objectives
High Cost in managing complexity
High cost of testing
Lack of transparency and control in delivery and change management issues in large programmes
Poor re-use of key IT assets
Lack of Business agility hindered by inefficient IT Architectures

So removing ambiguity by joining up things, moves us from “art to engineering” leading to the industrialisation of IT through efficient use of architecture methods

Testable architectures are the foundation of removing this ambiguity. Testable Architecture enables the architecture of a system to be described unambiguously using Choreography Description Language (CDL) such that it may be tested against requirements and is used to generate implementation artefacts for delivery thereby improving governance and control across large system integration programmes.

If we can deliver a solution that connects requirements to architecture and to implementation, we shall change the nature of complex systems delivery, reducing costs, mitigating delivery risks and improving time to market of key business functionality

Testable architecture methodology uses a unique combination of abstraction, modelling and simulation to the architecture definition process and the ordered interactions between participating components coupled with any constraints on their implementations and behaviour. Testable architecture is formal hence reduces defect injection across a programme lifecycle

Testable architecture is formally grounded and with strong type definition and has its foundations in “pi-calculus” which is a formal communication framework developed by Prof. Robin Milner – Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Cambridge and Turing award recipient:

Key benefits of Testable architectures:
·         Improved delivery assurance
·         Reduced cost of implementation and testing
·         Increased quality of overall solution
·         Increased agility of overall solution

Some of the noteworthy, real life implementations using testable architectures include:
·         HL7 - Lifesciences principle messaging interchange standard (CDL provides the dynamic model for message order enabling rapid deployment of HL7 Compliant services (a.k.a. SOA)

·         ISDA – Derivatives principle message interchange standard (CDL provides the dynamic model for confirmations, affirmations, etc.). Enabled rapid compliance to business protocols reducing lifecycle costs

·         Redhat - Principle System Description providing unique differentiator for Redhat’s SOA platform. Part of the community edition of Overlord

TOGAF is THE OPEN GROUP ARCHITECTURE FRAMEWORK which is the collective effort of many organisations (consulting, system integrators, and end users) within the architecture forum and it details processes, methodology and artefacts for efficient and effective delivery of enterprise architectures for any organisation regardless of the size (i.e. being scale invariant)

TOGAF 9 stands out as an important and well accepted standard for Enterprise Architecture with key artefacts, methods and processes to detail architecture of any size or complexity. These components and methods include:

The main iterative crop circles framework to define architecture
The content framework defining a clear standard for architecture documentation
Reference Models for business, information and technology architecture
Enterprise Continuum (contains the Architecture continuum and Solutions Continuum)
Architecture Capability Framework (to help organisations build an architecture organisation)

The benefits using TOGAF’s Architecture Definition Method we have seen:

Integration:

Integrates with other enterprise architecture processes / frameworks (i.e Zachmann, Gartner etc)
Facilitates integration of enterprise wide processes (i.e. by collecting artefacts and methods etc..)

Efficiency

Creates a repeatable and predictable process of developing enterprise architecture content
TOGAF ADM can be extended and customised as per the specific needs of the enterprise for e.g. scaling

Simplicity

TOGAF ADM is Process Driven : Inputs, Outputs and Steps are specified for each phase of the iterative framework

Predictability of Outcome

The outputs from one phase could be tracked back to the inputs for the next phase – i.e TOGAF ADM links inputs to Outcomes

Testable Architecture Methodology

The diagram below gives a brief overview of the testable architecture methodology which complements the TOGAF Iterative methodology given in the previous section across various architecture views business, information, application and technology architectures

Alignment of Modelling Methods

Modelling languages like Archimate help alleviate the issues around ambiguity by defining enterprise structure. However testable architecture aligns to TOGAF by describing the enterprise communications behaviour. Testable architecture adds scale and formalisms to UML and auto generates implementation artefacts that help in removal of ambiguity and thereby deliver robust solutions. The diagram below shows a pictorial representation of the alignment between these methods.

Testable Architecture and link to SAVARA

SAVARA, is the next generation of Testable Architecture’ methodology, that aims to give software architects insight into IT implementations at the architecture and design stage, meaning business scenarios can be modelled and changes made much earlier in the typical software testing cycle - before a single line of code has been written. Empirical research from Roger. S. Pressman(an internationally recognized consultant and author in software engineering) cost of correcting design defects at the traditional testing stage to be around 200% more than correcting them in during requirements or architecture stage. This is similar to research published by SEI Capability Maturity Model. SAVARA aims to dramatically reduce testing expenditure and overall software development costs through modelling and simulation and makes it enterprise scale.

With development budgets getting tighter and the need for agility becoming more important, there is simply no need for architectural errors to still be present in the testing stage of IT projects. They’re expensive and time consuming to fix and, crucial business requirements fall through the gaps. By bringing in a high level of testing rigour, measurement and formalism to SOA and the software development lifecycle, SAVARA will deliver real returns for customers, reducing the cost of ongoing projects, and freeing up budget for further, revenue-generating initiatives

Testable Architecture’ the foundation of SAVARA ensures that artefacts defined in each phase of the software development lifecycle (e.g. business requirements, architectural models, service designs, code, etc.) can be verified for conformance. For example, architectural models can be verified against requirements, service designs against architectural models and code against service designs. This guarantees that the deployed systems can be shown to implement the originating business requirements.

Epilogue

Better Enterprise Architectures are achieved through:

Focus on components (business, information, application and technology) and their inter-relationships across the enterprise

Adherence to best practices for modelling to describe enterprise states and communications behaviour

Adoption of formal methods for enterprise modelling like Testable Architecture (CDL) to ensure consistency and improve predictability of outcomes

Adoption of testable architectures to improve architecture governance and control over implementation artefacts

Usage of Testable architecture as an extension to Enterprise architecture methods to help clearly articulate formal descriptions for component inter-relationships

Usage of Testable Architecture methodology to auto-generate detailed contracts and implementation artefacts in adherence to functional and non functional system requirements

Further Reading
For further information please visit
http://www.jboss.org/savara
http://realisticenterprisearchitecture.blogspot.com/
http://pi4tech.blogspot.com/

Patterns to aid in discovery of Service Granularity

2009-09-26T06:28:00.000-07:00

Integration Patterns
The patterns contained within this section are primarily logical and SOA specific, and secondarily integration/interoperability specific.

Each pattern solves a specific problem, and in most cases there is no direct duplication within separate patterns that will solve the same problem in all cases. There is always a level of variance.

Each pattern is constructed with a series of logical components. A logical component can be physically implemented with one or more physical components, and can comprise of one or more pieces of technology.

Similarly, the separation between components is a logical one; therefore two logical components can be physically implemented with one or more physical components.

There is therefore another level of re-use beyond the scope of this section that ensures logical patterns are reused and physical patterns of implementation are also likewise reused.

Each pattern considers a standard set of architectural statements and non-functional requirements. Where the pattern deviates from these (usually requiring additional non-functional requirements) then these will be explicitly highlighted within the pattern

The following pattern and sub patterns have been identified:
· Request Reply Method
o Basic Request-Reply (Asynchronous)
o Request-Reply (with ownership transfer in reply)
o Request-Reply (Synchronous consumer)
o Request-Reply (Decoupled reply)

· Publish and Subscribe Method
o Basic Publish-Subscribe
o Publish-Subscribe-Reply (one or more replies)
o Publish-Subscribe-Reply (broker aggregates replies)

· One Way Message Method
o Basic One way Message (Asynchronous)
o One way message with ownership transfer
o One way message utilising ETL

SAVARA : (Architecture: From Art to Engineering)

2009-09-02T02:32:00.001-07:00

Software development lifecycle has never been a precise science which is usually driven by ambiguity in requirements, architecture and cascading effect of ambiguity into code. Hence the evidence of large number of IT projects that either fail to deliver or overrun on cost and timescales

Recognizing the need to eliminate ambiguity, we at Cognizant are collaborating with Red Hat to announce a new JBoss Community project called SAVARA that is aimed at solving this perennial problem of ambiguity through simulation and visualization by building upon the SOA Process Governance work that is going on within the JBoss Community (http://www.jboss.org/overlord).

PRESS RELEASE LINK: http://press.redhat.com/2009/09/03/jboss-community-launches-savara-project/

The SAVARA project applies engineering rigour and principles of industrialization to the software development process to improve productivity and quality of architectural artefacts, which result in reducing the cost and time to build business critical systems.

I am Co-chairing this initiative along with Gary Brown (from Redhat)

More details could be found at JBOSS Community Wiki http://www.jboss.org/community/wiki/SAVARA

Architecture and Governance Magazine

2009-08-13T04:17:00.001-07:00

My article published in the current issue of Architecture and Governance Magazine

Link: Bhavish Kumar - Enterprise Integration

Reuters Coverage of my talk at The Open Group EA Conference in London 2009

2009-07-20T05:52:00.000-07:00

TOGAF - EA Practitioner Conference

2009-07-03T11:30:00.000-07:00

I am officially running a survey for the Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Confernce (EAPC) working group to clearly identify the potential topics being presentd in future TOGAF Conferences.

Would really appreciate your feedback and support in filling up the survey by following the link below.

TOGAF EAPC TOPIC SURVEY

Basic definitions of various architecture roles

2009-06-22T09:21:00.000-07:00

Selected as best Answer on Linkedin

“IT architecture has always been compared to an engineering discipline like civil architecture or building systems design. Its only in the last decade or so that IT architecture has introduced a level of formalism and structure From a recruitment consultant's view the following could help

Enterprise Architect : EA refers to the holistic approach and mindset required to address an enterprise in terms of where it is today and where it wants to go in the future, along with the principles, roadmaps and frameworks that help to traverse the path. Enterprise Architect is a seasoned professional who has seen all elements of the value chain including (Business, Functional, Informational and Technology Architectures) and has been involved right from Visioning / Planning to the implementation of such a roadmap for an enterprise / organisation

Solution Architect - An architect who has covered the above mentioned areas with regards to a particular set of tactical OR strategic goals that have been clubbed into a programme. Further a solution architect will ensure that the solution envisioned for a particular enterprise is in adherence to the Enterprise Architecture roadmap and future direction set by the Enteprise Architecture function

Technical Architect - An architect whose focus is key to delivery of the infrastructure / technology elements of a particular programme or set of programmes. A technical architect looks primarily at Non Functional requirements to ensure that solutions delivered will fit with the existing roadmap defined by the Enterprise Architect in terms of adherence to technology principles, guidelines and policies.

Practice Manager - This is a body who has had many years of experience in one / or / more of the above roles at major customers delivering highly complex and risk driven programmes and has finally landed into a role that looks at the following priorities 1. Generation of Intellectual Property (Driving new value propositions to the market) 2. Marketing of these propositions 3. Sales of these propositions 4. Resourcing who can support the delivery of these propositions to the market. A practice on architecture typically would contain a mixture of the above roles you mention. Do let me know if you require further detailed informaiton.”

Thoughts on SOA

2009-06-19T05:18:00.000-07:00

The fundamental goal of Web Services and SOA is to improve ROI and TCO over traditionally implemented accidental architecture through point to point interfaces. However, the use of Web Services doesn't guarantee results. There are a number of challenges, many of which are organizational and not strictly technical, that needs to be addressed proactively to achieve measurable benefit.
Narrowing down the set of acceptable ways to use standards from all the available options needs to be checked with policies and procedures. Of course, many of these policies and procedures will naturally need to change over time as regulatory or other compliance requirements change, so when thinking about TCO we need to factor in the inevitable cost of change.

A second challenge is determining who pays for a service shared by many applications. With traditional line of business applications, figuring out who pays is easy - since one team owns everything. For a shared service, ideally each line of business should pay proportional to their use. Those who use it most should pay the most. Essentially this is a transfer-pricing model. It is important to consider how to track usage by each line of business accurately - if you can't measure usage, you can't charge for it!

A third challenge is ensuring that service levels are met. To end users, the customers of the IT infrastructure, the order management application is still the order management application whether it's built as a monolith or it leverages shared services. In either case it must meet the same expectations of performance, availability and functionality. Conversely, if the same user uses two different applications, he may have different expectations of each - even if both applications leverage the same set of shared services.

Let's look at some of the critical success factors (CSFs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) that organisations need to look at when adopting SOA (see diagram below)

While the core Web Services standards successfully address the mechanics of letting applications to talk to one another, successful SOA implementations through delivery of technologies like Integration Buses mean addressing the challenges that lie beyond the pure mechanics of communication. The complexities are numerous: stakeholders with different agendas, policies with cross-functional implications, service levels that must be maintained at all costs, complex interrelationships between services and no lines painted on the data centre floor to connect any of the dots.

Left to grow on its own, a network of Web Services will quickly degenerate into a tangled spaghetti of brittle, single-use integrations and fail to achieve the economies of scale or the cost and flexibility benefits of SOA.

These challenges call for a new breed of solution - SOA Command and Control - that addresses the various technical, business, and organizational requirements and unites all pertinent knowledge in the SOA into a form that's understandable and actionable.

There are five key imperatives of SOA Command and Control: Align, comply, observe, respond, optimize. These five imperatives encapsulate the required, and the associated value, of SOA Command and Control.

Align
IT is successful only if the business is successful, so IT must always be aligned with the business. SOA Command and Control must allow to measure SOA activity against business objectives to understand its current impact on the business, to determine how it's trending, and to predict where it will go in future.

Comply
True SOA Command and Control empowers stakeholders to move from a passive role to an active role of driving policy changes immediately and automatically across the organization. In addition, stakeholders gain visibility as to where and when the policies and procedures are being applied and/or violated.

Observe
By definition, SOA Command and Control provides both detailed and at-a-glance visibility into the inner workings of your SOA at any point in time - automatically, without expensive, time-consuming manual configuration. This facility lets us understand SOA-wide patterns and trends that would never be uncovered with solutions that provide simple statistics and only threshold, rule-based or predictive alerting.

Respond
Root cause analysis (RCA) is important in an SOA because symptoms rarely appear at the location of the root cause - and the root cause may be a service owned by a different group. With SOA Command and Control allow us to accurately and automatically determine the root cause of problems, without expensive, time-consuming manual configuration of rules or relationships. And, once the root cause is determined, the business process can respond in one of many different ways such as notifying administrators, black-listing users, rolling back service changes, rationing capacity, or modifying documents in transit. These responses can be triggered manually, fully automated or even manually overridden when automated responses don't produce the desired result.

Optimize
As with any IT infrastructure, services have a finite capacity to process consumer requests. Determining the capacity requirements of services is especially complicated because each consumer has a different pattern to use with different kinds of requests, and different peak usage periods. And, as new consumers come online, they consume capacity from the service and potentially affect the service level of everybody else. SOA Command and Control lets the business both proactively and reactively optimize the allocation of scarce service resources.

With an effective SOA Command and Control infrastructure, policies can not only be defined once, centrally, but also automatically enforced in the fabric of the network itself. The capabilities of an effective SOA Command and Control platform lets organizations bypass the knowledge gap and successfully achieve the economies of scale as well as the critical cost, time and flexibility benefits of SOA.

With effect to this need, typical organisations intend to leverage the power of standards based, metric driven SOA by implementing the ESB product suites for application integration using a phased approach.

Reference: Enterprise SOA

SOA GOVERNANCE

This is a business issue, as much as an architectural decision.

Requires understanding, motivation, commitment, leadership, and co-operation.

Let's start with what do I mean by IT Governance:

Governance is the harvesting, control and management of key assets owned by an organisation in order to promote and enforce their use for maximum business benefit

What do I then mean by SOA Governance:
An agile and efficient decision and accountability framework to effectively enable and assist in realizing the benefits of Service Orientation

What are the general aims of SOA Governance:
Business Services and Services Infrastructure Layer are key business assets and should be governed as such in line with Enterprise Architecture.

Achieve standardisation of data formats and structures across distributed business services ( split by organisational and geographical boundaries)

Achieve a shared services infrastructure (internal and external) at BSkyB through employing control and due diligence

Align Governance as far as possible to BAU policies and procedures

You might want to pause and think through some of these questions:

How are IT and/or SOA Governance decisions made today?

What decisions needs to made for your clients to have effective SOA Governance?

Who should make these SOA Governance decisions?

How will these SOA Governance decisions be made and monitored?

What Structures, Process, Communication, Tools should be deployed

When will these services go live on the bus?

The governance model above gives you a clear separation of concerns and the granularity of how a business service is realised in terms of its components focussing on information flow through information architecture that is further supported by technical services and data

What should you typically consider when establishing SOA Governance?

Thinking of SOA Governance as a thinly layered model helps to clearly articulate the vision and the deliverbales and ownership of actions thereby leading to helping to build the justification case/ business case with tangible benefits identified at each layer.

Each aspect of SOA governance requires defined goals

SOA processes and policies must be defined and documented

SOA processes must have clear accountabilities

Strong support/commitment from senior management is a necessity for SOA governance process to work

All SOA processes should be agile, that facilitates continuous change and feedback

Example SOA Governance Processes could be SOA Investment Approval Process or SOA Compliance / Alignment Process

For effective SOA Governance, it is necessary to have workable organizational structures to control and support all governance activities

People within the SOA Governance Model must be empowered to make and enforce decisions
Each enterprise will have differing structure requirements and should transcend the organization chart

SOA Board and SOA Compliance Team may have global, regional or business line scope

Pitfalls of SOA Governance

Cultural barriers

Readiness to change
Ownership of common services
Change management of services and processes

Business Case

Business drivers
Technology enablers

De-risk the future

Standardisation
Patterns
Consolidation

Breadth
90 Degree view vs. 360 Degree view

In summary "hope is not a viable SOA Strategy!"

Design Authority

2009-06-19T04:51:00.000-07:00

Attached above is an example Design Authority document flight plan that can be used as a checklist for establishment, mobilisation and execution of a fit for purpose Design Authority in an enterprise

OPEN GROUP SLIDES

2009-02-11T10:16:00.000-08:00

Presentations made by Bhavish Kumar at The Open Group Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conferences.

| Get your Presentation Pack

The Bridge between Enterprise Architecture and Programme Management

2008-11-20T06:22:00.000-08:00

Insight : EA and EI

2008-05-19T11:57:00.000-07:00

Prologue:

Enterprise Architecture (EA) can mean different things to different people depending upon the role and responsibility of the individual within the organisation and depending upon the context of the organisation (either being a consultancy OR an end user). To many it is a framework, while others view it as a collection of rules, or a methodology for defining and designing infrastructure services. However the common aims are to improve alignment of the IT Infrastructure with business goals and to attempt to bring stability to an ever changing, chaotic and complex situation.

EA provides the essential backbone (framework) or blueprints for the communication, interpretation and implementation of corporate objectives throughout the organisation and enables the evolution of a strongly aligned IT environment. A plausible way of achieving this would be through creation of a number of interconnected architecture views. The various available frameworks (commercial and / or non-commercial) break the definition of Enterprise Architecture into a different number models and artefacts. EA at the most consists of three main elements viz. Business, Information and Operations.

An effective and pragmatic EA relies on having a common platform and systems infrastructure on which to base the organisations products and services. What we see is, an increasing need of convergence of multiple technologies into a platform providing components for building, managing and deploying services. The convergence platform should be centred on loosely-coupled integration at all levels – system, applications, information, processes and people and the ability to quickly reconfigure these elements to react to threats and opportunities in an organisation’s environment.

How do we achieve it?

Well we first look at some guiding principles which are very much like a lighthouse providing necessary direction and steer to the IT transformation ocean liner… and they are:

Security – The delicate balance between acceptable risk and usability. This is becoming one of the main issues that all public and private sector organsiations have to contend with. It is vital that an enterprise’s information is adequately protected and it will become a precondition of doing business in the future, especially with the inextricable move toward e-business and e-government. The pre-requisite is for security architecture to be considered and deployed at an enterprise level rather than a last minute consideration that this area often receives.

Adapatability – This is required to keep pace with the ever-altering internal and external environment organisations find themselves in. Solutions have to be flexible, catering to changes in requirements, procedures, processes and organisation. Flexibility is also important for successful IT projects and to ensure the robustness of IT services. An important facet of architecture must be the use of modularity to enable continual adaptation, to meet changing business needs and allow re-use of software.

Standards – for open interfaces and data models delivered thorough an Enterprise wide Governance framework are crucial if an EA approach is to succeed. The use of standards extends further than just being used for interoperability. Openness is important for protecting IT investments, both in short and long term by shielding against supplier dependency. The move to more componentisation relies on standardisation.

Performance – must be a critical part of the architecture design. As with security it is very costly to add scalability as an afterthought. Systems need to maintain efficiency and service levels regardless of demand. The whole operation is reliant on the performance of the weakest link!. The architecture must support the increase in users, transaction volumes and data capacity and prevention of bottlenecks.

Management – of the complete architecture process is another important factor. The need for such features such as version control, end-to-end visibility, and monitoring become even more critical. The administration focus should be on support on SLAs, policy-based management and supplying a method of measuring effectiveness.

Defining EA:

EA facilitates a top-down , business objectives led approach, building up a coherent set of business, information, organisation and services architectures that provide different views of the organisation, relationships, proceses and data dependent upon the stakeholder requirements.

EA addresses the need to look at external factors such as market intelligence and exterior environmental events, rather than just looking at current portfolio of in-flight projects/ programmes. This enables the Enterprise Architect to strategise, draw synergies and evaluate opportunities and threats presented by these issues and to determine if changes are required to the enterprise blueprint

A services model utilises the logical-level deliverables provided by the other architectures (business and information) , expanding a platform-independent view of the business processes with associated data and presentation requirements, and using this to develop a platform and technology-dependent model, taking “cognisance” of technologies and utilising a services platform with common components and services. Approaches gaining significant traction in this area of SOA are enterprise class communications backbone like ESB, Model Driven Architecture and adoption of frameworks like TOGAF.

What are customers talking about?:
Enterprise Architecture:
· A number of organisations have implemented an EA. Approaches vary: it can be top down or bottom up
· An EA model can have four levels: Business Architecture, Information Architecture, Applications & Systems Architecture, Technical Architecture
· It is important to have a common vision of where the business is going: this greatly influences application and hardware strategy.
· Key: model the business based on its services: processes can then be modelled within this
· Use templates for EA. Aim for reusability. Identify interdependencies
· Basic tools such as Visio plus Word, or Visio plus Office are commonly used (about half of delegate
· organisations only use these)
· EA is the technique for communicating with the business: methodologies and tools help this
· Tools can be used to document applications and business processes (not necessarily in one tool)
· Important: Consider how the information from the tool will be used to ensure it is fit for its purposes and aids communication

Plans:
− The business strategy translates into the IT strategy.
− Have a planning period covering three years
− Review and update the plan regularly
− Have a decommissioning plan
− Expose projects at an early stage.

· Build governance from the board down. A strong CIO is needed to get support from the business
· Identify the IT elements of business budgets and aggregate them: this shows a total cost of IT
· Have some form of EA Policing / Auditing / Review. Always review pilots
· Achieving control: a lot can be achieved by making the adoption of governance part of personal appraisal objectives.

Enterprise Integration:
Increase the access to and ability to change the Application Services (based upon business need):
− Open published interface standards including XML data formats, Web Services, JMS, FTP and HTTP. Further WSDL and W3C Schemas as service definition” language, and SOAP as the “messaging protocol language”.
− The capability to selectively store message data in an external data store as it traverses the middleware
− Reduced impact of changes to IT Business services to the business

Improve the availability and reliability of the Application Services
− Access to additional (existing) services.
− Generic high availability interconnects facility between all supported system components
− Reduced technical risk of supporting IT Business services
− Load Balancing , fault tolerance and automatic scale up through configuration provisioning

What to consider when focussing on enterprise integration?:(See table)

Typical Offerings in this space:
Enterprise Architecture Maturity Assessment - An exercise that involves interviewing and work-shopping with key individuals of the organisation usually at the CXO level to enable addressing immediate needs and setting the direction for the “internal” enterprise (application, programme, organisation - portfolios) and for the “external” enterprise (partners, suppliers, sourcing strategies, selling strategies and most importantly customer retention and growth)

Envisioning – A technique that aims to align organisational stakeholders to business opportunities / challenges through a rapid, high impact and workshop enabled process. This alignment also takes into consideration the core elements or requirements of a solution that addresses this issue or opportunity, and a credible delivery plan. This approach can further be used to capture detailed requirements and to help with tactical and strategic decision making

Thought Leadership and Innovation around SOA – through a robust framework based upon the integration of Programme Management (MSP) and Enterprise architecture methods (TOGAF), EAI COE offerings around specific technologies and further through active participation of standards bodies like HL7 , W3C on Choreography to name a few.

Epilogue:

This paper deals with some of the basics around why organisations are giving a serious thought to Enterprise Architecture and how these considerations play a major role in linking to initiatives like Enterprise Integration.
While it is important to focus on immediate programmes at hand – it is becoming increasingly imperative to also take a step back and view the enterprise from a “aircraft pilot’s viewpoint” to enable stronger linkage of IT initiatives to Business goals, strategies and measures.

Enterprise Integration through traditional EAI methods need to focus on distributed / federated architectures that span multiple geographies and disparate business processes.

A clear view on the definitions, policies and standards for EA and requirements for EI will help the architect on the ground to safely steer this ship to the target destination.