EA - Enterprise Architecture in Action

Last week, I was analyzing the raw data of this year's enterprise architecture survey (the last one is here). Why don't you do EA? "We don't believe that the traditional EA program is the most effective use of our time." Wow!

On Thursday, I met one of our customers. The person I spoke to was in charge of Architecture for the organization. And the starting point of the discussion was: "We have a huge transformation programme going on. We really do not have time to do Enterprise Architecture".

We have all seen these wonderful EA programmes, which spent two years documenting the current state before starting to look at the future. And those progammes for which the future was a simple "we reinvent the world based on XYZ" (insert CORBA, J2EE, Web Services, SOA...). And what does that mean for our business? Either you get no answer, or you hear abstract statements of "agility", "lower TCO", etc.

Yes, this approach to EA is a waste of time. But how can we do better?

Enterprise Architecture helps organizations aligning their resources in support of their value chain. It is issue driven - it has to start at themes like "How can we align our customer interaction channels with the changing needs of today's population?" And it needs to find answers to the most pressing questions of the organization - now, not in a couple of years.

That was what I discussed with the customer mentioned above.

And we agree that it was a good use of time.

Thomas Obitz

Principal Architect and EA Evangelist EMEA

Posted by Thomas Obitz at 6:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While the strategic concerns of business-IT alignment is being touted as the primary USP of SOA based initiatives, with a view to making the business processes flexible while leveraging the standards based loosely coupled IT interfaces offered by SOA, such strategic adoption is still not commonplace yet. However, SOA is quitely making inroads in more tactical projects involving information integration scenarios be it legacy data integration, EII, or portals.

The advantage of applying SOA at data layer, is manyfold. Primarily it offers a mechanism to streamline data access across heterogeneous sources, which was earlier done with quite cumbersome custom mechanisms. Further, it brings about a uniform interface to carry out shared tasks like common schema/data definition, shared security etc. for diverse data sources. An important effect is also in seen in form of a more regulated pattern of entry / exit to data sources, which in conventional deployments would be a mess of point to point connections. For more on shared data services and their role in SOA see the following articles:

1. Leveraging shared data services in data integration, by Krishnendu Kunti, Mohit Chawla, Vikram Sitaram, in SETLabs briefings, Vol 1, Service Oriented Architecture, 2007, pp 3-8 , accessible http://www.infosys.com/technology/toc-soa-managing-hype.asp or http://www.infosys.com/technology/setlabs-briefings-soa.pdf 

2. International Conference on Next Generation Web Services Practices (NWeSP'06)   pp. 49-55, An approach to automating transactions in a data services platform, Srinivas padmanabhuni et al. Accessible http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/NWESP.2006.7 

3. V. Niranjan, Sriram Anand, Krishnendu Kunti: Shared Data Services: An Architectural Approach. ICWS 2005: pp 683-690, Accessible http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1530861&isnumber=32665

Posted by Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni at 6:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

SOA is mainstream today and is beyond the pilot phase in many enterprises. What is the catalyst for this success. A common theme that appears is that the modularity and flexibility SOA offers has begun to provide meaningful results. The key to leveraging standards based contract driven approach to IT provisioning for business, lies in successful engineering of the contracts and interfaces with a business orientation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From a business perspective, SOA  will enable bringing of rigid engineering principles to building business solutions. On the same note, it will enable availability of business modules which can be assembled on the fly. To enable large scale realization of this vision, an immense opportunity awaits the enterprises, with a real chance of getting closer to the all elusive business-IT alignment. Already many early adopters are showing the way in terms of proving the value of SOA, notwithstanding the hype, reality has begun to sink in terms of business benefits of doing SOA right, with a business perspective.  Further the power of SOA is also in the powerful collaborative ecosystems it can catalyse..

For a deeper perspective on the state of the practice, the future possibilities, and other enterprise concerns in SOA including vertical flavours of SOA, read the editorial of SETLabs briefings, Vol2, 2007, on "Implementing Service Oriented Architecture", pp 89-91

Visit http://www.infosys.com/technology/toc-implementing-soa.asp to dowload and read the article.

Posted by Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni at 5:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)