Happy Holidays from EA

We will be taking some much needed time off for the holidays. We'd like to thank you for your readership and we encourage you to check back with us next year for more innovative thought, perspective and news surrounding the world of enterprise architecture.

We wish you a joyous holiday season!

Evolve EA: Best of 2008

With 2008 drawing to a close, we're going to share the best articles of the year. We look forward to keeping you up to date on enterprise architecture in 2009!

Microsoft’s Enterprise Architecture Toolkit (EATK)
Types of Enterprise Architecture
FEMA Gives EA Subcontract to REI and IBM
What is the role of a Enterprise Architect in a programme?
Putting the 'E' in TOGAF

Sun Microsystems Value Proposition

James McGovern highlights in his latest post in Enterprise Architecture how he has recently switched IDEs away from Eclipse and towards Netbeans. James believes that Sun Microsystems does not do a good job of selling their value proposition. Do you agree?

What are the Benefits of Enterprise Architecture?

It seems as if upper management still doesn’t quite understand the benefits of EA. So here’s a post from Shrikant Mulik on his blog in which he lists some business-related benefits of EA taken from a research briefing written by Jeanne Ross and Peter Weill. I’ve listed them below.

The business-related benefits include the following:

• shared business platforms - greater data sharing and integrated process standards
• senior management and business unit management satisfaction
• strategic business impact - operational excellence, customer intimacy, product leadership and strategic agility

What to Put in your First Release of EA?

Tony Abel, CEO & Chief Solutions Architect at dotNet Framework Solutions, mentions in this post on CIO Knowledge Base that a good enterprise architecture model always starts with the business element in order to encompass the entirety of the enterprise. Tony always begins his projects with top-management so that they can be more educated to the essences of enterprise architecture. Do you have a similar process in your organization?

More Findings from the Infosys Survey

Infosys recently completed their 3rd annual survey on Enterprise Architecture which you can view here. Sohel Aziz brings up some interesting findings in this post on the Infosys blog when he mentions:

One of the key findings is that participants of the survey saw Enterprise Architecture as a capability that was core to their business and inherently part of their organization's crown jewels. However, given the daunting set of activities that most Enterprise Architecture functions have to execute today, the opportunity to work with ESPs and enlist them to execute some of these activities is real. In other words, some activities (the more tactical ones), can be outsourced to a strategic vendor partner.

Read the full post here.

Enterprise Architecture is Essential to Protect Government Networks from Cyberattacks

This post on GCN discusses how EA plays an integral part on stopping cyberattacks from occurring within government networks and computers. Ron Ross, a National Institute of Standards and Technology senior computer scientist mentions:

“When I got into actual discussions, I turned my view around to the point to where I think we can’t be successful as security professionals unless enterprise architects are successful on their end. Enterprise architecture, I believe, is going to drive the ultimate success of protecting our critical infrastructures.”

Read the full article here.

60 Second Guide To Enterprise Architecture

Every now and then we need to revisit what exactly is enterprise architecture. I came across this basic presentation on slideshare that does a good job of revisiting this question. Take a quick look!

60 Second Guide To Enterprise Architecture

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