US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement adopts EA

Dynamics Research Corporation won a contract to develop enterprise architecture for the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. The deal is for one year, and has four one-year option extensions. This follows DHS working with the US Air Force and an inventory program along with supporting the US Coast Guard with IT Services. Read more here.

Acquisition system of federal government in need of EA

According to Jim Williams, the acting GSA Administrator, the current acquisition system needs structure and a common way of looking at processes. Enterprise architecture would provide these things. It needs to have a standardized process, to be able to join various parts of the process and provide consistency.

With his vision, enterprise architecture would: change how the government looks at a system comprised of people, the complex processes, and how the technology fits in.

Growing interest in enterprise architecture

Recently, Lauren McKay pondered whether this new trend of growing interest in enterprise architecture would continue to build and grow into a sustainable process, or whether it was a trend that would eventually fade away.

Since enterprise architecture focuses on governance structure, business processes and business information, it is a trend that can keep going? The interest highlights a direct link between technology and the business done by the company trying to align the two key facets of their company.

What do you think? Is EA the growing trend, or is it something that companies are going to set aside in a few years?

Are Enterprises Training Developers to Write Secure Code?

James McGovern discusses in his latest post on Enterprise Architecture that companies are missing out on important opportunities of securing the enterprise by simply encouraging staff members to attend local OWASP chapter meetings.

Security will always be a factor in the enterprise. The training of security awareness in employees will only further their understanding about the importance of information security. It also makes architects more receptive to certain vulnerabilities that exists in current code.

Is your enterprise ensuring that developers write secure code?

Saving Money and SOA

Often repeated is the refrain about the ailing economy. This latest post from ZD Net, promises solutions for continuing SOA, with little money instead of simply commenting on the problem. The author mentions that many people so worried about the economy do not believe that it is possible to spend any money on better solutions to current processes, and instead just keep plugging away with what they have available. Ron Schmelzer from ZapThink, has this solution as stated in the blog post:

“focus on iterative, process-driven SOA efforts;” the quick wins. And, as Ron points out, “you won’t need to convince senior management to part with precious funds. Rather, you can simply offer the business to recover the costs by improving the business process and using those recovered funds to reinvest in the enterprise architecture, starting the cycle again.”

Do you think that your organization could benefit from this approach?

Putting the 'E' in TOGAF

EA Directions recently published findings based on analysis of IIR's Web Seminar "Putting the 'E' in TOGAF". Here are some of the discovered findings as stated in this news release:

Finding #1: The majority of organizations in North America do not use TOGAF. Among those that do use TOGAF, only 16.4% use TOGAF as their primary enterprise architecture (EA) framework. Almost two-thirds of those that report they use TOGAF (65.6%) use it as a reference tool.

Finding #2: Only 11.1% of TOGAF users described TOGAF as "very effective" for solution architecture efforts. The remainder described TOGAF as "somewhat effective" or "mostly ineffective" for solution architecture.

Finding #3: Only 6.7% of TOGAF users described TOGAF as "very effective" for enterprise-wide architecture efforts. The remainder described TOGAF as "somewhat effective" or "mostly ineffective" enterprise-wide architecture.

Finding #4: It appears that, among webinar participants, the more a firm relies on TOGAF, the more likely they are to evaluate TOGAF as "effective". The opposite also appears to be true.

To view the entire archived webinar click here or go to this website: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/924415223

FEMA Gives EA Subcontract to REI and IBM

Back in September IBM was awarded with a contract from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to help "modernize" their Enterprise Architecture system. The value of the project is approximated to be $915 million over the next 6 years. In latest news just announced here, REI Systems Inc. has been brought on board to assist IBM, and have been awarded a contract with FEMA for around $225 million. Other additional members of this team include: Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., Oracle Corp., and Computer Sciences Corp.

LiquidHub Not Slowing Down

While many companies are going through hiring freezes as a result of the current economic upheaval, LiquidHub has a different point-of-view as remarked on here. Mr. Jonathan A. Brassington, CEO of LiquidHub, had this to say:

Inspite of the cautious global business environment the company has a robust order pipeline and is hiring aggressively both in the US and in India. LiquidHub sees a great opportunity in the current downturn based on its Enterprise Architecture philosophy where clients can "do more with less"

What philosophy is your organization subscribing too? Is Enterprise Architecture helping to whether the storm?

Layers of Enterprise Architecture

David Linthicum discusses in this post on InfoWorld that well-designed enterprise architecture will provide a stable platform for computing. He goes to on mention how working up from ring 0-2 you will come across many different layers, and how they need to be managed very carefully to ensure that the enterprise will not lock up. So indeed, process architecture and enterprise architecture has a lot in common. Make sure to read entire article here.

Symantec Integrates Its Products with Enterprise Applications

Information Week reports that Symantec will soon adopt open architecture so that its products can be added as services to enterprise applications. Some of the products include antivirus and anti-intrusion applications.

Here’s what Christine Ewing, the director of product marketing, has to say about what Symantec is calling Open Collaborative Architecture:

"It's not a product. It's more of a strategic direction that Symantec is taking."

Symantec is relying on open web service standards in order to achieve integration with its products and enterprise third-party applications.

Apache Tuscany Enables SOA solutions to More Easily Respond to New Business Requirements

The SOA Network reports that Apache Tuscany has released version 1.3.2 of its Service Component Architecture (SCA) for Java.

Apache Tuscany provides a dependable infrastructure for deploying, running, and building SOA solutions as well as addressing real business problems posed by SOA. Anthony Elder, ASF Vice President and Chair of the Apache Tuscany Project Management Committee mentions:

"Over the past two years, the Tuscany community has focused on developing fully open, standards-based, large-scale SOA solutions. We continue to receive enthusiastic support for Tuscany's simple, highly extensible Service Component Architecture (SCA), Service Data Objects (SDO), and Data Access Service (DAS) subprojects. Becoming an ASF Top-Level Project and great ideas for future development -- including improvements in application server integration, distributed runtimes and Web 2.0 support -- underscore how Tuscany continues to go from strength to strength."

It will be interesting to see how this infrastructure will play out in the upcoming months.

Outsourcing Enterprise Architecture

James McGovern brings up an interesting concept in his latest post on Enterprise Architecture. There’s an outsourcing trend that not many companies have caught on to yet. Many times when developers are outsourced to India, the architectects jump into American forums and ask them to help them write their codes.

Open source communities are made in order to support people and not help them write their codes for them. Has anyone else caught onto this trend? Are corporations really getting a deal when outsourcing personnel?

Building an Agile Organization

I came across this great slideshare presentation on the topic of Enterprise Architecture. It's titled Anatomy of Agile Enterprise, and I think it does a great job of covering different levels and layers of the EA field. It also helps viewers gain ideas for building an agile organization. Hope you enjoy the presentation below!

Anatomy of Agile Enterprise

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: agile enterprise)

New site to design your enterprise architecture

Barry and Associates recently announced that they have a new web site that will help companies design enterprise architecture. This particular page will contribute designers work through the decomposition process.

Doug Berry, the creator of the website, had this to say:
"The Decomposition Matrix is intended to augment your existing methodology. It provides designers and subject-matter experts with another way to work through issues related to the design of an enterprise architecture."

You can design the decomposition process of your enterprise architecture here:
http://www.designdecomposition.com/

Synovus Financial Adopts EA

Recently, Synovus Financial won an award for successfully implementing SOA from CIO Magazine and SOA Consortium. Their goal was to create a secure vault payment platform and an Automated Clearing House payment program. To find out more about how they were able to successfully implement SOA properly, please read the article here.

Eight Characteristics for SOA Implementation

Mike Kavis at CIO.com recently compiled a list of the behaviors that can contribute to the efficient implementation of SOA.

-Strong Executive Level Sponsorship and SOA Evangelist
Someone in your company with power should be behind the project. This drive change throughout the organization and also helps work through any roadblocks that may arise during implementation.
-Define Completeness of Work within Services The business needs to understand why SOA is important to their needs. Fina a way to demonstrate that it's going to be an asset and value in the future
-Established a Center of Excellence (CoE) Appoint someone who will be in charge of the SOA initiative. Have controls in place to define to show the SOA results.
-Start With a Well-defined Business Process and Scale Up Start with one strong business process your company has in place then work up. And have your vision in place so you can reach that in the future.
-Define Completeness of Work within Services Put thought into which services are key business drivers. Only choose those businesses services that add value to the company.
-Quality Assurance is Key Be sure to include performance, security and governance testing in your plans.
-ROI Is Difficult to Achieve Initially and Is Realized Over Time Value is maximized with architecture over time. ROI will begin to develop and spread as the projects gain maturity.
-Deliver Substantial Business Value

Enterprise architecture in the next presidential term

According to Andy Blumenthal at User-Centric Enterprise Architecture, enterprise architecture is one of the seven things that is not likely to differ when a new president takes office. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that it's a useful tool for Chief Information Officers. Although it is a hard task to set up and manage, the benefits of a successful structure are worth it.

He concludes his article with this:

EA will not only be saved, but will continue to thrive. As global competition continues to heat up, the pace of technology change spins faster and faster, and constrained resources continue to press us to do ever more with ever less, our organizations will be forced to respond in strength. Organization’s will continue look to enterprise architecture to better plan business process improvement and IT enablement and to govern sound investments and change. User-centric EA will keep the efforts focused on valuable and actionable architectures.

From ITWeb

MEGA has released a System Blueprint, as reported today on ITWeb. According to the article:

MEGA has introduced System Blueprint, the first software tool on the market that links application design directly with business requirements for the development of IT systems, large IT projects, and service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions, reports Marketwatch.

System Blueprint is designed for companies that develop and integrate software applications. It assists organizations with the aligning of strategic and operational requirements.

Interestingly…

MEGA System Blueprint provides a model-driven approach for the analysis and design of applications, and focuses on the logical specification of an IT architecture supporting a business activity.

Do you see MEGA’s announcement as big news or is this just typical of EA infrastructure?

Techworld: Sybase launches new modeling tool

According to Techworld, the UK has seen some enhancements with Sybase’s modeling tool.

David Dichmann, Sybase's product manager for design tools said the changes had been made to improve agility within an enterprise. He said that there was an analogy with business intelligence. "If you look at the way that we build business intelligence systems, we enter the customer information and how to manage that, but we forget the architecture," he said.

Also…

the product uses what Sybase calls Link and Synch technology which works by capturing the intersections between all architectural layers and perspectives of the enterprise. This allows users from all groups to clearly visualise and effectively implement fast, reliable and predictable change.

For more information on Sybase, please visit their website: www.sybase.com

Some industry colleagues are skeptical about this new endeavor; what do you think?

Burton Group’s New Research Model Ready for Tough Times

According to MarketWatch, Burton Group ( www.burtongroup.com) has announced plans to develop a research T1 model that will be available for 2009.

“Burton Group IT1 offers a complete spectrum of research and advisory tools via a simplified licensing model which includes company-wide access to all of the firm's research coverage areas and unlimited analyst dialogues. This approach is unique compared to traditional analyst firm pricing models that limit access by selling individual seat licenses.”

And interestingly…

“Burton Group's client base is comprised of 85% percent enterprise IT end-user organizations in aerospace, automotive, financial services, education, energy, government, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and retail. Burton Group projects more than half of its current clients will adopt its new IT1 research license model in 2009.”

What do you think are the keys to their success?