Category: Enterprise Architecture

The message to the US Congress is that the US federal enterprise architecture program and agency enterprise architecture initiatives are beginning to achieve strong results, but still, significant work remains to achieve the full potential existing with the federal enterprise architecture. Karen Evans and others sound optimistic, others don’t.

Mark Forman, the former US federal CIO, also argues that the Federal Enterprise Architecture “needs to move to a service-oriented architecture and away from one that focuses on symmetrical multiprocessor concepts”. To get to service-oriented architecture, Forman says that agencies must do the following:

• Use commodity instead of proprietary hardware and software.
• Move from silo to shared resources where agencies build for component reuse and integration.
• Stop building monolithic applications and apply the shared service approach.
• Automate more IT services to improve their quality.

This is very much in line with the Danish strategy.

Last week, FCW quoted one of my bosses:

In Denmark, nonelectronic and e-government services are designed to be provided governmentwide. Officials are even changing their political structure to provide better service, said Mikkel Hemmingsen, deputy director general of the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. He spoke last week at the META Group Inc.’s Government Enterprise Architectures Conference in Arlington, Va.

The country has 14 counties and 274 municipalities of varying sizes, but a wide-scale reform effort will include consolidating those to five counties and 100 municipalities. Once that reform is complete, the goal is to “have a political structure that is suited to the services we want to deliver,” Hemmingsen said.

Denmark’s enterprise architecture process, which focuses on everything from Extensible Markup Language to document management systems, is designed to include input from the private sector on every issue, he said. Although citizens are not involved, this process ensures that no government technology or IT policy goes forward without public input, he said.

Tim Bray writes about WS-Good Practices and WS-Theory and concludes:

I think somebody needs to stand up and start waving a flag that’s labeled ‘WS-Simplification’ or ‘Real Web Services’ or something, that’s all about building applications with what’s here today and what works today: XML, HTTP, URIs, SOAP, WSDL, and that’s about it.

Tim, here is a flag:

The Reference Profile is the Danish e-Government Interoperability Framework. Though the framework covers more than WS-technologies, these are an important part of the framework.

We have lots of XML – 32 out of the 107 included standards are XML-related – and of course we have HTTP. We acknowledge SOAP and WSDL as mature enough for “real” usage, and do also hold UDDI on “yellow”. Hmm. URIs – where do these go as far as being “standards”?

Tim Bray also writes about HTTP over SOAP ?!?!?, about the new W3C Working Draft on SOAP Resource Representation Header, where he reveals the secret of Australian sheep counters, who can glance at a gaggle of hundreds or even thousands of sheep and in an instant tell you the exact count: “The trick is, they count the legs and divide by four.”

The reference profile has been in a public hearing which has just ended (although we are not strict with the deadline, so if you want to submit a comment, do so anytime).

We have received comments from a variety of public and private organisations – from the Danish DoD over IBM to the local Linux user group. I am yet to dig deeper into them, but a quick scan shows that we have successfully delivered a much-requested deliverable. Expectedly, there are a number of “issues”, but almost none that surprised me and weren’t on my to-do list already. That list is pretty long, however.

We are now gathering a strong team who will join forces on making the reference profile even better. The final verison 1 should be ready before the summer. We will approve it in the National ITA Committee on 10 June.

Interested in joining our team? We have a half-year replacement position open in NITA. Ideal for a newly graduated. Get in touch, if you are interested.

Successful and mature e-government can only be achieved through a process of building organisational infrastructures that enable innovative action strategies to thrive in the culture of interoperability.
Architecture, not technology, should be the main driver in the modernisation of government. Enterprise Architecture is about integrating business strategy planning and IT strategy. Basically, the message is that we must focus less on IT, per se, and more on the process of organising and managing IT across government agencies.

From ‘Enterprise Architecture for e-government’, John G�tze in IDA Report 21 – March 2004 (download PDF) and IDA eGovernment Newsletter n�7 – March 2004

I want to follow up a bit on this idea of a culture of interoperability in eGovernment. Interoperability is, perhaps especially in Europe, a burning issue everywhere (at least everywhere I go …).

In the European Interoperability Framework, we say that there are three important aspects we need to tackle: organisational, semantic and technical interoperability.

Organisational interoperability is concerned with defining business goals, modelling business processes and bringing about the collaboration of administrations that wish to exchange information, but that may have a different internal organisation and structure for their operations. Moreover, organisational interoperability aims at addressing the requirements of the user community by making services available, findable, accessible and user-oriented.

Semantic interoperability is concerned with ensuring that the precise meaning of exchanged information is understandable by any other application not initially developed for this purpose. Semantic interoperability enables systems to combine received information with other information resources and to process it in a meaningful manner.

Technical interoperability covers the technical issues of linking up computer systems and services. This includes key aspects such as open interfaces, interconnection services, data integration and middleware, data presentation and exchange, accessibility and security services.

These aspects of the issue can be taken further, it occurs to me. In our white paper, we talk about five important principles interoperability, openness, security, flexibility and scalability – for an enterprise architecture. We have been trying to consolidate these principles for a while, and have good support for this, but keep meeting requests for more explanation and direction signals. So here is an idea. For each of these principles, we look at the same three important aspects that we need to tackle:

• organisational, semantic and technical interoperability
• organisational, semantic and technical openness
• organisational, semantic and technical security
• organisational, semantic and technical flexibility
• organisational, semantic and technical scalability

Does this work? I think so:
– organisational openness: transparency, democratic openness
– semantic openness: use of open data definitions, access to data issues
– technical openness: use of open standards for data access, access to source code, etc
– etc

My PhD-student Kristian is working on an interesting model about interoperability. So far, the model is two-dimensional, but it might soon become three-dimensional 😉

The excellent European eGovernment Observatory publishes an eGovernment Newsletter, “A quarterly report providing insight on the most relevant developments of the last months”. I have just accepted an invitation to write an article about our work on enterprise architecture for the newsletter, thanking the editor for considering our work “most relevant developments of the last months”. So, if you don’t already subscribe to the newsletter, do so now 🙂

I don’t quite know how much time I have to finish the article, but I have been asked to write about:

– What is Enterprise Architecture and is why is it important for e-government success?
– Is it possible to simply transpose EA concepts and tools from the private sector to government, or are there some public sector specificities that make EA slightly different in government than in private corporations?
– Most European governments have worked out interoperability frameworks and government-wide service delivery infrastructures before starting to work on EA. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to work out an EA framework first?
– What has been done in Denmark and what can be learned from the Danish experience?
– What are other governments doing in the field of EA, in the US but especially in Europe?

OK. Some quick thoughts:
– EA is basically about bringing sense into our e-government work. IT does matter, but it is our “business”, or mission, that counts.
– Compared to the private sector: “slightly different”, you bet. I think EA makes a lot of sense to any enterprise. In a private enterprise, where the boundaries are well-defined, it makes immediate sense. But for government, what is the enterprise? The whole of government? A sector (health, environment, etc)? A domain (e.g. “medication at home”, which crosses over between health and social affairs)? A ministry? An agency? A major challenge to EA in government is to define the boundaries of the enterprise for which you’re doing architecture.
– framework first? Maybe, but you can’t really look at things like that. But yes, EA should be all-inclusive, and too many projects running ahead without coordination can be dangerous.

Photo: Jakob Dall

Kristian Hjort-Madsen (sitting) is officially now a PhD student. We signed the papers yesterday.

On the picture, from left:
Me, Kristian’s supervisor
Jørgen Abild Andersen, director of the National IT and Telecom Agency
Sten Davidsen, vice-director in KMD
Thomas Gregers Honoré, software director in IBM, and
Mads Tofte, president of the IT University.

My first task as supervisor will be to get Kristian to start a blog.

S�ren pointed me to two more, relevant publications for the EA course. These are:

Christopher Alexander‘s classic A Pattern Language. At least the introduction should be used.

Patterns for e-business: A Strategy for Reuse by Jonathan Adams, Srinivas Koushik, Guru Vasudeva, George Galambos, 2001. ISBN: 1-931182-02-7. Chapter 2-4.

The book is not online, but IBM’s e-business experts do put lots of good stuff online. For example, the Patterns: Applying Pattern Approaches Redbook, and the Patterns: Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services Redbook.

The latter might be useful when we go into the SOA issue, which we of course will. Here are more to the list then:

G�tze, Hjort-Madsen, Nielsen (forthcoming) SOA p� dansk. (SOA in Danish)

Lublinksy and Tyomkin (2003) Dissecting Service-Oriented Architectures

Martin Fowler (2002) Web Services: Pathway to a Service-Oriented Architecture?

What else here?

The EA-T8 course starts soon.

I’ve been looking at potential extra-curricular course material about enterprise architecture. Here is what I have on my list right now:

Introduction to the theme

ZapThink (2003) Calling the Elusive Enterprise Architect: You’re More Important than Ever

Nicholas G. Carr (2003) IT doesn’t matter, Harvard Business Review

Marc Demarest (1998) CityWare: Information Technology Planning And Urban Planning

John Hagel and John Seely Brown (2002) Break On Through to the Other Side: A Missing Link in Redefining the Enterprise (PDF)

Spewak, introduction

On June 13 2003 the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation published a White Paper on Enterprise Architecture.
DGEAF (Danish Government-wide Enterprise Architecture Framework):

• EAS – EA strategy
• EBA – enterprise business architecture
• EIA – enterprise information architecture
• ESA – enterprise solution architecture
• ETA – enterprise technical architecture
• Implementation

I’ve listed some material for these areas below:

EAS:
Assuming we can’t assume the students have an academic background, we might have to start with some basic stuff.

Porter, M (1996) What is strategy? Slideshow
Ogilvy, J (2003) What Strategists Can Learn from Sartre

But quickly on to EAS.

Maybe we should use the IAC white paper on Interoperability Strategy – Concepts, Challenges, and Recommendations (more white papers at the IAC-EA SIG site, for example, the one on maturity.)

Governance is a central issue.

Maybe use stuff like the Governance Dashboard:
Pardee, T (2003) Herding Cats for IT Governance, in Enterprise Architect, November 28, 2003

Maybe a case? Vetarans Affairs! With Zachman and all.

Look into different strategic approaches:

System approaches
Scott W. Ambler (2003) Agile Enterprise Architecture: Beyond Enterprise Data Modeling
Ambler’s essay is a summary of a chapter in:
McGovern, J et al (2003) The Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture, Prentice Hall

Framework approaches
Classics: TEAF, Zachman, …

(system vs framework? hmmmmm…..)

EBA:
Besides work that can be bought, what is central to EBA?

John Hagel and John Seely Brown (2002) Control versus Trust: Mastering a Different Management Approach (PDF)

EIA:
John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid (2000) Social Life of Information

Michael C. Daconta (2003) Designing the Smart-Data Enterprise, in Enterprise Architect, November 28, 2003

ESA:
Fielding, R T (2000) Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures, PhD-dissertation, University of California

John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Scott Durchslag (2002) Orchestrating Loosely Coupled Business Processes: The Secret to Successful Collaboration (PDF)

ETA and Implementation – later.

Any suggestions for more to put on the list??

Adaptable-Enterprise.com has been launched today by Ark Group. The site is about Permeating the IT services landscape in a dawning era of business process transformation. The site’s catch phrase: If your business is not already affected by utility computing – it will be.

Features of the site:

• The Adaptable Enterprise newsletter has been launched to “provide senior decision-makers with the 3rd party information they need to navigate their way through the growing mass of vendors and information surrounding this business transformation offering.” I contributed with a feature article, Architecting government, and can warmly recommend the free, bi-monthly newsletter. Ask Jacquie (address at link above) to become a subscriber, and remember to ask for the first issue.
• Case Studies Section with a number of concise case studies/interviews. case 10 is about the Danish Government.
• The Adaptable Enterprise Summit, announcement of a conference to be held in June in UK, which I think will be great.

To celebrate, I have added stuff to the Utility Computing category in GotzeLinked. That means I now have a useful utility computing links service, available as RSS 2.0-feed, RSS/RDF 1.0-feed, and OPML-feed.

My return-to-university (teaching) plan seems to work out: 13 students have signed up for the Enterprise Architecture course, and we have a go from the IT-University to run the course.

I look forward to the course, and will make every effort to make sure the students enjoy it too.

Phil Windley has inspired me to establish a course blog (to be established). My co-pilot, S�ren, doesn’t blog, yet. The university also offers some collaborative tool, which we’ll look into.

We have desided to use Spewak’s classic book as the basic course book. We’ll top that with a number of articles and book chapters during the course.

Maybe something like:

Marc Demarest: CityWare: Information Technology Planning And Urban Planning, from 1998.

A few chapters from John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid’s SLOFI.com, 2000.

And some of these.

Any suggestions for reading material for EA-students?

At last, The United States General Accounting Office publishes the report: Information Technology: Leadership Remains Key to Agencies Making Progress on Enterprise Architecture Efforts. The report, GAO-04-40, is dated November 17 but released December 18. GAO’s Randy Hite was scheduled to present the report at the GCN EA conference, but it was sealed for further political processing, and Randy had to improvise – which he did excellently, as one of the best speakers on the conference.

The +400 pages report describes the Management Maturity Enterprise Architecture Management Maturity Framework (EAMMF) 1.1., and examines the state of architecture in US fedelral government. The conclusion (p 52):

Overall, the federal government�s state of enterprise architecture management remains less than satisfactory, with little progress being made over the last 2 years.

For a quick overview, see the Highlights. FCW also has a piece about it. GCN did one last week.