Join us in Sweden at beautiful Rånäs Slott on 6-7 May for a SOAthon.
CSC and EA Fellows invite to a unique and challenging 24 hour course, aimed at top level business process owners, enterprise
architects and business planners planning to implement a SOA architecture or wanting to get a full and concrete understanding of what it means.
Get the English invitation. (course language is English)
Speaking of changes … the Danish central administration is facing some major changes.
Yesterday, Computerworld broke the news (Gigantisk it-revolution pÃ¥ vej i staten): The government will establish two centralised, state-wide administrative service centres, one for IT service, and one for HR, travel admin, financial management, etc. Today, the Minister of Taxation came out and presented the IT service centre plan. Estimated savings: 425 million DKK annually, a lot of money compared to the US. Significant staff reductions are planned: In IT, from current 1.576 FTE to 1.132 over three years. The IT-consolidation will reduce today’s 4.000 servers to around 700.
On Tuesday, the Minister of Finance presented the central government budget proposal for 2008, which enforces a 1% spending freeze. Hmm, guess they’ve read Kotter’s eight steps to change management, where step one is to create a sense of urgency for changes.
Michael Karvø and other experts applauds the plan. And so do I. But just as Kim Viborg Andersen, professor at Copenhagen Business School, I do also see some if not many pitfalls and significant risk elements. The central government administration is a darn complex beast, and only rarely acts as one enterprise. On the other hand, over the past several years there has been many attempts at enterprise solutions at the state-wide level, especially with administrative services, so in some areas, these changes are just “natural” next steps towards “the state as an enterprise”.
Been there, done that? Dorte Toft reminds us that it is barely a decade ago since the Danish state had its own, central IT-service centre, the Datacentralen, which was then sold out to CSC. Whether the new plan is in fact a revival of Datacentralen – Datacentralen 2.0? – is quite unclear to me. From what I can read (also I haven’t seen the actual proposal/report) the plan will not necessarily mean more insoucing and “home taking” of tasks and operations. It’s more about re-souring, if you want – moving tasks and operations from individual ministries and agencies to the new service centre.
IMO, it’s a good strategy to go with Area 12 in this process of enterprising the state. “Area 12” is the call name for the service area called “Administration and Management” in the Government Business Reference Model, FORM, which the Ministry of Finance released late last year. FORM must now be seen as a very essential tool in the implementation of the plan, and I really hope the decision makers will understand that. Basically, they need to understand what is administrative IT and what’s not, and that is exactly what FORM can help with.
If anyone out there has experience with enterprise architecture in the airline business, I would really like to hear from you.
I can offer a chief architect or CIO/CTO in an airline some intensive sparring with 15 skilled architects during the week of 8-12 October. Need review of your target architecture? Sequencing plan? Particular artifacts? Or just want to share some of your stories and experiences?
If you happen to be in Northeren Europe (esp. Belgium or Netherlands), and can come to Antwerp, you’d be invited to join us in person. Or if you’d like to help via phone or email, we can also work with that.
I would also appreciate comments, stories, links etc to anything of interest to EA in the airline industry (air transport and aerospace in general too).
I personally only know the airline business as a customer (frequent traveller), but judging from that, I can easily imagine EA being not just neceassy but indeed also challenging in an airline. In other words, same situation as in most other industries, but maybe even more so than most other places.
EA necessary?
Well, yeah, with all those standards, requirements and controls the business needs, and all the prescribed processes, data exhanges, and system interoperability/connectivity, of course EA is needed.
EA challenges?
Well, yeah for sure! With hub-locks, safety concerns, e-ticketing, traveller convenience demands, green house gasses, service valuation and process elimination, and many more drivers from the strategic level (what’s our mission?) all the way down to the technology and infrastucture level (99,9% uptime not good enough on mission-critical systems, etc.). Oh, and the VLJs and the fourth platform.
Have you noticed how relatively little is written about enterprise architecture in government? Time to change that …
We started writing this report as a final deliverable from the ICA Study Group on Enterprise Architecture in Government, which we co-founded back in 2003. Having done that, we then thought, why not keep writing. So we did.
The result is, we hope, a report that anyone concerned with transformational government will find worthwhile reading.
Our concern is government enterprise architecture, which in our view is far from “a big fat jokeâ€1. Having said that, we also find a gap between what we see in government EA around the world and what we would like to see.
That’s how Olov Östberg and I start off our report, Interoperability, Change and Architecture (PDF, 1,2MB), to the International Council for Information Technology in Government Administration, ICA, and the EA world at large.
We would love to get comments on the report.
Recently, the European Commission’s IDABC published a document written on contract by Gartner initiating the revision of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and the Architecture Guidelines (AG). Check out the EIF v2.0 Gartner-report.
I represented Denmark in the comittee that created the EIF and maintained the AG, so of course I read the Gartner-report with a biased view. Then again, I always tend to read documents from Gartner with a biased view.
These days I also read a lot of masters theses and other reports by my students, and I can’t help comparing the Gartner report to a student report.
The Commission asked Gartner inc. to “make a study, situating the European Interoperability Framework in relation to the current practices in the Member States and elsewhere and to give an independent view on the revision process and on its desired outcome.”
If the Gartner consultants were my students, they should fear the exam, because I would confront their problem understanding, their methods, their empirical depths/shallowness, and not least their pseudo-theoretical analysis and model-amok. Having said that, I admit to finding some of their proposals pretty interesting, for example, their Generic Public Services Framework is conceptually interesting, but not very well explained and motivated.
Researchwise, the Gartner report does not go into much if any detail with respect to the national interoperability frameworks that have been established in several member states: Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Ireland, Malta, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and United Kingdom.
EIF presented a pretty clear definition of open standards. EIF 2.0 will, Gartner suggests, “allow open standards and other recognized standards to coexist”, and Gartner recommends not to focus on the use of open standards per se.
That calls for a campaign, someone decided. See openstandards.eu:
On the content of EIF v2.0, I ask
1. that EIF v2.0 recommends the use of open standards, as defined in the definition given by EIF v1.0 for all exchanges by public institutions and states, as did the EIF v1.0 document,
2. that recommends the use of open source software, by public institutions and states, as did the EIF v1.0 document,
3. that EIF v2.0 recommends the use of open standards for all communications eg. documents, videos, sounds … they publish, to and with the public for example on their websites, by the public institutions in Europe, at the European Commission and all the member states, and conform to open standards for the tools they provide,On the elaboration process of EIF v2.0, I ask
1. for the explicite public consultation during a sufficiently long time, for the redaction of such an important report as EIF v2.0,
2. for the explicite participation of SMEs and a majority of members states for such a consultation and document redaction.
I signed it. Go sign it too!
When I a month ago prepared for a lecture about architecture, I found some interesting videos on YouTube. My students loved them. So, when I today gave a talk to a group of Danish CIOs, I thought of showing at least one of them, but on site decided not to because there wasn’t internet access.
I first found the video Meet the Architects, an example of viral (or maybe not so viral) marketing from a place called scyscrapr.net, but by and large, a decent “light” way of applying the urban planning metaphor to describe architectural work. I’m sure there was a more subtle campaign site there, but now it points to Microsoft’s skyscrapr, “a new site on MSDN where you can learn about software architects and architecture”. Skyscrapr seems to be a pretty cool information service, see for example their Archipedia, which offers brief descriptions of (software) architectural terms.
And then I found Greg the Architect: SOA This. SOA That. and Greg the Architect: ROI of the Beholder. This is Tibco‘s award-winning viral SOA marketing. I’m not sure about SOA Now, the magazine the videos promote, but I love the videos.
Update August: Some logistical changes. Some date changes, and some place changes. I’ve updated below to correct dates/places.
Update July 2007: More dates added due to popular demand.
Danish visitors, see enterprisearchitecture.dk!
Announcement: Carnegie Mellon University and Telelogic Collaborate on Enterprise Architecture Certification Course Series, Coming to Europe
The Enterprise Architecture Certification Program, offered by Telelogic and Carnegie Mellon University‘s Institute for Software Research International ISRI, “will give you the knowledge and skills you need to successfully implement an EA initiative in the public or private sector”.
The program was launched last year in the US, and I’m pleased to announce, that it will now come to Europe.
I’ve made a deal with CMU and Telelogic, and will be in charge of the execution, i.e., be the instructor.
We’re launching the program down in Antwerp, Amsterdam and Brussels. We’re looking at other locations, and are open to requests. The scheduled courses for now are:
Level 1
EA: Fundamentals of Enterprise Architecture
10-13 Septermber, Bruxelles (full)
24-27 September, Antwerp
12-15 November, Amsterdam
Level 2
EA: Applied Enterprise Architecture Concepts
8-11 October, Antwerp
14-18 January 2008, Antwerp
Level 3
EA: Advanced Enterprise Architect Concepts
20-22 November, Antwerp
19-21 March 2008, Antwerp
The three-level structure of the courses is based on a set of EA Knowledge and Skills Areas (KSAs), that identify what enterprise architects need to know to do their jobs at various levels of the organization (see the top level of ISRI’s EA-KSA List), and specific learning points within each KSA are used to develop the teaching objectives in each course.
The program curriculum is based on the 350 learning points associated with the CIO Council EA competency matrix, and hence aligned with the 42 EA learning objectives in the 2006 Clinger-Cohen Core Competencies and Learning Objectives.
The comprehensive curriculum is compiled from the experience and best practices of top organizations worldwide, by Dr Scott Bernard and staff at Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Software Research International. Scott has written the EA text book, which I’m using in my university EA masters class, which roughly equals the level 1 course.
On the certification program, candidates can attain the title Certified Enterprise Architect after passing three intensive course exams.
I’m really looking forward to running the program. Please spread the word!
A year ago, my former collegue Søren Peter Nielsen wrote, on behalf of the Danish government, a letter to Microsoft. Seems he got a response, and I’m sure it’ll interest XMLGrrl and many others, that an announcement was made yesterday: Agreement between the National IT and Telecom Agency and Microsoft: Agreement concerning partial support of the SAML 2.0 standard.
“The ongoing dialog between the National IT and Telecom Agency and Microsoft has resulted in an agreement on partial support of the SAML 2.0 standard in Microsoft’s forthcoming version of their federation product named Active Directory Federation Services 2”, the agency writes.
The text agreed upon is as follows:
“The Danish public sector has chosen SAML 2.0 as their federation standard. Microsoft products use WS-Federation and WS-Trust as the foundation of their federated identity architecture. The Danish government has agreed that the SAML 2.0 token format is sufficient to provide basic interoperability between WS-Federation and SAML 2.0 environments as a common assertion format, without loss of authentication integrity.
To support interoperability between WS-Federation and SAML 2.0 based products Microsoft has agreed to support the SAML 2.0 token format in the future release of Active Directory Federation Services code-named Active Directory Federation Services “2”. Microsoft will provide the Danish public sector Centre of Service Oriented Infrastructure with pre-release code to help analysis and planning of solutions for integrating WS-Federation-based clients in the Danish federation, and to collect feedback on the feature implementation.
In addition, the co-authors of WS-Federation (including Microsoft) have submitted the specification to OASIS for standardization. This step further enables interoperability between federated environments that deploy SAML 2.0-based products and those that deploy WS-Federation-based products.”
In commenting the agreement, the agency writes: “With this agreement a possibility for inclusion of Microsoft based clients in a common public SAML 2.0 based federation has opened”, and notes:
The integration will require the standard based login solutions to be expanded with a special integration code. The solution is therefore a pragmatic tactical integration solution, but with the above-mentioned partial SAML 2.0 support from Microsoft it is expected that the integration can be done without influencing the individual “Microsoft Active Directory Federation Service†user organizations.
The agency notes that more iinformation on the concrete possibilities will be published as the National IT and Telecom Agency’s Centre for Service Oriented Infrastructure receives pre-release code from Microsoft that can be integration tested.
The agency elaborates a bit more on the deal:
It is still desired, that Microsoft support all of the SAML 2.0 standard in their products, but the above-mentioned agreement are a good first step towards more convergence among standards for transverse user management.
The National IT and Telecom Agency also sees the filing of the WS-Federation (WS-FED) specification for standardization in OASIS as a step that can promote convergence among federation standards.
It should be stressed that it does not mean that the WS-Federation specification is recommended equally to SAML 2.0 for common public solutions.
When the results of the standardization with WS-Federation become available (expectedly in the end of 2008) it might be relevant to do a new assessment but for now the SAML 2.0 it is still the only standard, which is recommended as a federation standard for Danish common public solutions.
So, there we have it.
I want to congratulate Søren Peter on a job well done. Stand firm on SAML 2.0, the open ecosystem needs it. And thanks to Microsoft for listening to customers (but why only partial support?).
Norway’s Minister of Government Administration and Reform, also Minister of IT, Ms Heidi Grande Røys, in a press announcement on Friday, Første skritt mot en offentlig sektor uten leverandørbindinger, announced that with the launch of the Norwegian Government’s interoperability framework, called Referansekatalog for IT-standarder), the Norwegian government takes “the first step towards a public sector without vendor fixation”.
Of particular interest is that the Norwegian government boldly goes ahead and proposes mandation of a set of standards for document formats:
Regarding ODF, according to Digi.no, Ms Røys at the press conference said she wants ODF to be the preferred document format also internally in the administration, and not “just” for external communication. But as I read the published documents, there is no actual mandation of internal use. One could – and should – of course argue that ODF “all the way” is the only sensible way to implement the policy, but I’m sure some will argue otherwise.
According to the press announcement, the interoperability framework is in consultion until 20 August 2008. I suppose they actually mean 20 August 2007. The mandation is proposed enacted by 1 January 2009.
Included in the interoperability framework is a set of national government standards, such as NOARK4 for archiving, and also a plan for extending the framework to other areas. On the latter, the document analyses the Danish, Belgian, German and British interoperability frameworks standard by standard, and explicitely argues that a European alignment and cooperation is necessary.
I’ll be attending a few conferences as a member of the Press in the coming weeks, so if you’re there too, and want to meet up, do get in touch.
On Sunday, I’ll leave for Vienna for SAPPHIRE 2007. “Business at the speed of change“. It’ll be interesting to hear more about where SAP is with SOA and much more, but frankly, the presentation I look forward to the most is the one by Geoffrey Moore, on Business Network Transformation to Create Competitive Advantage.
Then in June, I’ll go to Orlando for the IBM Rational Software Development Conference 2007. “What Keeps Me Rational?”. I think I’ll focus on architectural issues, and it seems there will be talk about both SOA and EA. It’ll also be interesting to hear about where Danny Sabbah is with Jazz.