EA - Enterprise Architecture in Action

SOA was one of the main themes at the ongoing Open Group Architecture Conference in San Francisco this week. Not only were the discussions in SOA taking more than 70% of the discussion topics, the debates that followed through in the Q&A and during breaks was adding enthusiasm to the conference.

There was more business mentioned than I have ever heard before, forcing me to think that many of the attendees might actually go back to their office cubes and get to work on building their own business domain skills and financial prowess.

What struck me though was the emphasis or lack of on data and process architecture. The workshops, presentations and discussions focused a lot on application and governance, but lesser on simplifying process and data complexity. This is the next big challenge and opportunity in the market. I took time to test it with several attendees from product vendors to current and potential clients, the decision was made “we need it”!

With global economies becoming flatter and mutli-polar the systems will keep getting more personalized and complex. It will be the architect's role to keep the systems connected, accurate, nimble and most important simple.

The conference and the discussions are far from over, but one fact is certain, the CIO and Enterprise architects are on the most wanted list.

Posted by Sohrab Kakalia at 8:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So, a new year has begun and I am sure each of us have made a series of unachievable resolutions yet again this year :-). For enterprise architects out there who have made resolutions to progress their visions and practices, some advice.

We are getting into a potentially dreaded 'R' (recession) economically.  Markets are expecting to see a bit, central banks are at a loss between managing creeping inflation and spurring demand and providing a support harness post the sub-prime fiasco.  Pressures on IT budgets will be increased and transitively on enterprise architecture.  What is an enterprise architect to do?

My suggestion is to bank on transformational initiatives, the time to invest is now. Winning in the turns should be the party line.

EA initiatives should focus on process transformation and outsourcing; enhancing decision making by defining an information architecture and leveraging service oriented principles to reduce application portfolio complexity and redundancy.

So to keep it simple, resolve to transform and 'cut-out-the fat'. This means you need investment dollars to prepare the journey into a lean, mean, enterprise that can pounce on opportunities as the economic tide turns.

Posted by Sohel Aziz at 4:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Traditional portal server platforms (JSR 168 Portlets, etc.) and the new breed of enterprise mashup technologies are now providing twin ways of aggregating enterprise information and creating portal composite applications. Mashups (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-mashups.html) concentrate more on rapid and mind-blowing easy integration of multiple sources of information supplying data in multiple formats (RSS, JSON, ATOM, etc.).  The sources could also be web services. For example, Yahoo pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/) provides you with easy-to-use building blocks which allows you to manipulate and filter data feeds from different sites by sequencing these blocks appropriately. It took me 30 minutes to learn what actually are Yahoo Pipes and build a simple Yahoo Pipe for retrieving RSS feeds from Sun’s SDN website with an upper limit on the number of entries (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=zGLDfJq93BGWZBrjw5tC8g). Enterprise mashups would be aggregating information from existing enterprise applications and hence the security features need to be more robust.

However, besides content aggregation, the composite enterprise portal applications also enable one to perform business transactions accessing services from multiple enterprise applications from a single window using single sign on. This is where perhaps the non-mashup style enterprise portal might still have an edge. Modern portal platforms also enable workflows capabilities by integrating the portal server capabilities with the workflow task management and business process execution capabilities such as the SAW in Sun JCAPS (https://saw.dev.java.net/docs/SAW-UserGuide.html). Besides, the traditional enterprise portal platforms provide enterprise capabilities such as security, reliability, etc. Hence, while on the content aggregation front the line between the traditional portal technologies such as JSR-168 portlets (http://developers.sun.com/portalserver/reference/techart/jsr168/), IBM Lotus http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/tutorials/notes8-comp-apps/lz-dw-lz-notes8-comp-apps.html and mashups are slowly getting blurred, on the business transaction and enterprise capability front the traditional portal technologies might still have an edge. But again it may be a matter of time…

Posted by Sudeep Mallick at 9:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)