Category: Enterprise Architecture

Bob Sutor is “beginning to think that the 2 major themes of 2005 are Interoperability and Innovation“. I’m subscribed to his blog thread on interoperability, and hope he is going to travel much in the near future — he told me that he blogs most extensively when travelling, and now he has to blog not only about interop but also about innovation 🙂

Microsoft has opened PatternShare, which is

… a wiki site that aims to increase pattern sharing, dialog, and usage by bringing together people who want to learn proven solutions to common problems from people who have solved them before. The pattern format combined with the flexibility and community ownership of the wiki make the site ideal for this kind of community.

The wiki is created around the Enterprise Architectural Space Organizing Table, which is

… a two-dimensional table that captures and organizes business artifacts according to the decisions that produce them. Business artifacts could include plans, notes, models, scripts, code, or other items that different roles in your enterprise use to make decisions and view the enterprise architecture in different ways. The PatternShare uses the table to organize patterns.

The organizing table is en extended Zachman framework, and is described as “a highly granular map” of “the enterprise space” that is organized by viewpoints, roles, and interrogatives. Read more in Describing the Enterprise Architectural Space, or check this webcast..

Patternshare.org is based on Flexwiki.
Appearently on an old version hereof, because it has the old Firefox-bug. That’s really a pity because it creates a lot of noise.

By using the framework (“organizing table”) as a container of documents, the wiki offers its users the possibility to browse by architectural viewpoints (TableRows), by interrogatives (TableColumns), and by roles (TableRoles). The documents are tagged with simple metadata when entered to the wiki, and the table and lists are generated automatically based on these metadata tags.

Flexwiki is not the only wiki that is used in EA: Design by wiki: Enterprise Architecture on a Budget. I cannot find any links to live installations of the EA-wikis mentioned there, so it is difficult to compare with Flexwiki. From what I know about the various wikisystems, I would say that Flexwiki could learn a few tricks here and there, but that it does well in comparison. Especially if the coming version 2.0 has just half the feaures they talk about. The intelligent links doesn’t work in Firefox neither, by the way; I had to dig into the page source code to find this link.

I don’t know where things go wrong. That is, it seems to be a problems in the javascripts, but is it Firefox of Flexwiki that is to blame? Basically, that doesn’t matter – Flexwiki should support other browsers that MSIE.

Technorati: patternshare

GotzeTagged: Enterprise Architecture.

I use the tag Enterprise+Architecture, and the category Enterprise_Architecture (which itself becomes a tag then, and, I think, the tag I send to del.icio.us when posting to GotzeTagged.

Again, we see some ambiguity in the tagging approach. Examples:

Del.icio.us: Enterprise+Architecture and Enterprise_Architecture?
Technorati: enterprise+architecture or enterprise+architecture?

Tags should be one-word constructs, I read on del.icio.us. Does that mean that Enterprise+Architecture is the tag construct to use?

My EA course at ITU had exams today/yesterday. Some (fortunately most) performed very well, but others didn’t do that good at all (one failed). Surprisingly, we did not have any in between. I guess one could crudely conclude that either you get it or you don’t. But as I reminded some of the students who didn’t do well, EA itself is not “binary”. Maybe, however, studying EA academically is more categorical, or at least, writing a relatively short, yet substantial, academic report for the exam is somewhat of a craft that you need to learn. Several students are practitioners and very experienced, also in the architecture field, so they faced the challenge of “being academic” (more refective) about their own situation.

In the coming semester, T8 Spring 2005 will be offered as normal classes on a weekly basis. The netbased format proved too challenging for both students and the teacher. In additon to the classes, I will use my wiki/blog-solution.

I have revised the list of course material, but will continue using Carbone as the main textbook. In addition, some Zachman, Herzum, Hagel and more, almost ad libitum. I use to tell the students that one of the challenges enterprise architects face is that they are easy victims of information overload, so they might as well get used to it …

The Polish eGov.pl’s featured “topic of the week” is enterprise architecture, and they have translated my EA for eGov gig in the IDA newsletter. The Polish translation goes: Zastosowanie architektury korporacyjnej na potrzeby eGovernment.

Thanks Andrzej!

I recently found an old essay by Joel Spolsky, Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You, which I keep returning to:

When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending each other spreadsheets, and they realize that there’s a general pattern: sending files. That’s one level of abstraction already. Then they go up one more level: people send files, but web browsers also “send” requests for web pages. And when you think about it, calling a method on an object is like sending a message to an object! It’s the same thing again! Those are all sending operations, so our clever thinker invents a new, higher, broader abstraction called messaging, but now it’s getting really vague and nobody really knows what they’re talking about any more. Blah.

Is there an Architecture Astronauts Anonymous??

Another quote:

Remember that the architecture people are solving problems that they think they can solve, not problems which are useful to solve. Soap + WSDL may be the Hot New Thing, but it doesn’t really let you do anything you couldn’t do before using other technologies — if you had a reason to. All that Distributed Services Nirvana the architecture astronauts are blathering about was promised to us in the past, if we used DCOM, or JavaBeans, or OSF DCE, or CORBA.”

Written in 2001. Still an issue.

Finally, Gary and the other good people at the Treasury Board Secretariat in Canada have published the updated Business Transformation Enablement Program (BTEP). This is world-class work on enterprise architecture in government.

My thoughts goes to James Macphee and his beloved. James is one of the architects in the BTEP-team. He had a strong allergic reaction to a bee sting, and is not well.

I had the pleasure of hosting a chat between Jane Carbone and the students at my ITU course yesterday.

Jane has a new online course up at the DCI eUniversity. It’s called Advanced Architecture Topics, and pinpoints some highly relevant issues:

This in-depth course explores what is necessary to create a working target architecture. It will focus on how to develop EA outputs, and train you in a methodology for developing complete target Architecture. Jane will discuss what these critical outputs are – business drivers, principles, models, strategies and standards – and include specific methods for developing them.

Sounds good.

FCW reports on the growth of training opportunities in the US: EA university.

My class on EA at ITU started last week. I have 16 motivated students, many of which are practioners.

I am preparing for the new term at university. I teach a masters course at the IT University. The course is about enterprise architecture. The course is also on open university offering and still open for registration for a few more days.

The course is using “blended learning”, that is, it is partly netbased and partly based on classes/seminars (four Saturdays) and a group project with field work. Besides using a dedicated e-learning platform (Luvit), I plan to use blogs, feeds and P2P tools. I know of at least one blogger among the students. Would it be inappropriate to ask students to provide a dedicated RSS-feeds? Either from a blog, or from whatever can create a feed.

As for the course book, I have decided to retire Spewak’s book, partly because I thought it might be relevant to invite the author to an online chat (Spewak sadly died earlier this year). I used Spewak’s book last term, and found that it was a bit heavy on the students, and also quite expensive. I’ll still recommend Spewak’s book, of course.

But I have chosen IT Architecture Toolkit by Jane Carbone as the new course book. This book, published just months ago, presents a simple yet comprehensive “toolkit” for practical enterprise architecture. I think Carbone’s framework will be welcomed by the students, although I realise that the book cannot stand alone.

So, I am also going to collect a number of papers and chapters for the students. I am open to suggestions for good EA-material.