Holistic Thinking and IT Professionals

In his latest post at Enterprise Architecture, James McGovern brings up this question “When was the last time you ran across a holistic IT security professional?” He mentions that holistic thinking, which requires technical leadership, is something that is missing from most IT professionals in the enterprise.

According to James, ‘technical’ enterprise architects that are familiar with coding must be brought into the security building process in the beginning stages and not later. Do you agree with this?

The Goals of EA

Every organization defines the goals of Enterprise Architecture in their own distinct way. Anton Venter lists six goals of practicing enterprise architecture in his latest post on the IT Knowledge Exchange. Here they are:

1. Successful and timely Business transformation
2. Bringing models and views together by implementing universal compatibility between them (integrating everything and using a common language)
3. Going on-line, e.g. by using a portal
4. Maintaining a balance between strategic enterprise-wide goals and the operational and tactical needs of individual business units or segments
5. Focusing on short- and medium-term Business benefits
6. Focusing on 20% of major threats and opportunities that will have an 80% impact on the Business

What are your company’s goals of practicing EA? Do they differ from Anton’s?

Carphone Warehouse sees benefits to SOA

As reported by this article at CIO, Carphone Warehouse, a mobile phone retailer in the UK, moved to SOA in 2005. Even though they saw immediate benefits, there were other things that were still falling behind in their IT system. There were still 53% of new service designs that were failing governance tests the first time and there was still duplication in some of the services performed.

As a result, they adopted HP Systinet. This SOA governance tool helped 95% of new service designs pass the governance test. It has also estimated that this new software will save them £526,000 over the next three years, due to the avoidance of duplicating processes. It also will allow the IT department to deliver new services to the business in the shortest amount of time possible.

Do you think that corporations selling SOA governance tools are starting to respond more to customers needs?