I had the pleasure to eat lunch with Giovani Salvador yesterday. Giovani is an architect at Dell based in Brazil and will be leading the initiative to get the Brazil Country Affiliate (country level architecture management) underway. We spoke of a number of things including growing chapters, government relationships, university accreditation and business planning. Going to be an exciting time for Brazil and South America.

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This presentation will explain the nature and structure of machine-readable semantic metadata that is now coming on line in standards for the manufacturing and financial services industries and is being increasingly used by ERP vendors, opening up possibilities for a new generation of model-driven tools that make integration analysts substantially more productive and accurate.

Subjects include:
· Economic and technical forces that are increasing the demand for data integration
· The difference between syntactic metadata and semantic metadata
· Why "model-driven" and "metadata-driven" are similar in practice
· Use of semantic metadata in industry
· Use of semantic metadata in standards

DAVID FRANKEL is a member of SAP's Standards Strategy and Management team, which is part of the Global Ecosystem and Partner Group.  He focuses on standards for the financial services sector and for model-driven systems. David has 30 years of experience as a programmer, architect, and technical strategist.  He is recognized as a pioneer and international authority on the subject of model-driven systems and semantic metadata.  He has published two books and dozens of trade press articles, and has co-authored a number of industry standards, including UML and the upcoming revised version of the ISO 20022 core methodology for optimizing financial networks.

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View the presentation decks

W H Inmon, Collaboration: Integrating the Work Product
Glenn Engrstrand, Choosing a Software Architecture for ECM
Joe Moran, A Framework for Deploying Collaboration Solutions

Keynotes:

Bill Cason, EA 2.0
Scott Ambler, Agile Strategies for Enterprise Architects
Simon Guest, Patterns for Cloud Computing
George Paras and Tim Westbrock, Don't Call It EA If It Isn't EA!: Moving From IT Architecture to Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Track

Richard Alexander Green, Zen and Enterprise Architecture- Beginner's Mind
Dirk Zwemer, Building Metrics Into Enterprise Systems Models
Tan Say Chuan and Roland Sim Boon Teck, Enterprise Architecture Appriach to Holistic Technology Management
Lutful Khander and Jag Ramaswamy, Transforming a Legacy Application Into a Hybrid Cloud Application Using SOA: An Innovative Look
Max Poliashenko, Applying Six Sigma Approaches to Quality Attributes

Infrastructure Track

Rahul Khanna, Service-Enabled Data Views
John M Hammer, Scalable Web Architectures for Growth to Millions of Users
Mark Grand, Inter-Enterprise Software Architecture Case Study-CaGRID: an Infrastructure Supporting Biomedical Researchers Across Different Organizations
J.P. Morgenthal, Total Service Cost- A Metric for Comparing Cloud Computing Alternatives

Software Track

Daniel Brookshier, Mixing Requirements, Modeling, and Code- Finally Software Requirements That Aren't Lip Service
Burkhardt Hufnagel, The Layerperson's Guide to Building Better User Experiences: Redux
Jeeth Garageshwara, SOA to the desktop: Think Clients on a Diet

Fundamentals Track

Max Poliashenko, Defining, Trainging and Certifying Architect's Competencies
Paul Lockwood, Avoiding Performance Pitfalls


 

A Turning Point for the Government Cloud

Los Angeles is moving to the cloud, according to Public CIO Magazine March 2010, and “they are the first government of its scale to chose Gmail for the enterprise.”

http://usercentricea.blogspot.com/2010/03/turning-point-for-government-cloud.html

Interesting details about the Google SLAs

This book really is about Enterprise Architecture with the emphasis on the enterprise and not the IT architecture. Written by a frustrated practitioner it offers a cohesive while perhaps not as comprehensive as one might like methodology in a very compact 130 + pages including glossary.

The book starts with devastatingly simple proposition that "Enterprise-architecture is the integration of everything the enterprise is and does." It works for me. The first chapter establishes the methods framework a twenty five cell structure that maps Purpose, People, Preparation, Process and Performance drawn from a project management methodology against five "sideways views". These are Efficient, Reliable, Elegant, Appropriate and Integrated. While I kind of get the 5 Ps I kind of missed the "sideways views". I mean Elegant?

The lack of a foundational theory and the immediate progression to a framework is a little alarming particularly when the rest of the book is then dedicated to filling out the framework. Twenty five cells in about 120 pages (less than five pages a cell) with I must say a reasonable amount of white space at the end of many of the sections. Not surprisingly, there is not much meat to the tools and techniques used to fill out the cells.

Given its size this volume was never going to be much more than a set of architect's notes. But putting that aside and being impressed with it not giving into the temptation of becoming an IT architecture book, I have to be positive about this book. Small, concise and perhaps a little overawed by the concept of recursion this book tackles EA without falling for the IT trap.

This is a book as it says itself for chief officers, strategists and programme managers and I agree with that. This is not the book to start your collection with and probably isn't that much use to the average IT focused corporate architect. And frankly it's a bit pricey for what it is. But, is it worth a slot in your EA library? I'd have to give it a reserved yes. Not wishing to damn it with faint praise, it is what it is.

Graves, Tom (2008), Real Enterprise Architecture, Tetradian Books, Colchester

ISBN 978-1-906681-00-5

This is an interesting book. In a curious way it is almost devoid of an underlying theory, something I've criticized many methods and books for and yet it maintains a cohesion that is difficult to fault. This book is about models, decision and analysis techniques and that makes it quite a rare and useful volume. I am frequently dismayed by the poor analytical skills of architects that I encounter day to day. This book has the analysis process and its management as its central theme and manages to do it without becoming overly academic which is a bit of a triumph.

Think EA meets operations research and you'll start to get a feel for a book dedicated to rational (no not the IBM brand) enterprise information systems management. This is EA as decision support for the CIO. It discusses strategic issues like goal setting and decision alternatives and domain definition. It then takes these goals and breaks them down into properties and provides techniques for collecting evidence; a practice that isn't as well developed as one would expect in many organizations.

The authors support this approach with a huge number of simple, but thought provoking models just the kind of thing you need to get you working on your problems. My favorite is the credibility of evidence model. There's a section on intuitive EA assessment in which they manage to give the process a lot more structure and logic than the usual rubbish that passes for intuitive analysis. And the section on organizing for EA actually has more content than is apparent on first inspection. But you'll have to work your way through the models. Based on COBIT the EA as a process approach reminds me a lot of Spewak and Hill with the same directness and perhaps a similar failing to grapple with social realities.

The book only credits two authors on the cover however I counted about adozen contributors. The writting is clear concise if somewhat bland typical "Euro Architecture" style, but at 300 pages not too hard a read. This is not the book to base your practice on, it's not strong on governance or business integration. However, it is one of the best technique books you'll find. This is the sort of book that you'll reference more than read. Not a book for beginners or managers but obviously worth its place on your bookshelf.

Johnson, Pontus and Ekstedt Mathias (2007), Enterprise Architecture, Studentlitteratur AB, Lund,  Sweden

ISBN 978-91-44-02752-4

An interesting article about SOA and Integration in the Cloud bring agility and value down to earth.

Read article here 

This whitepaper will examine how IBM and Hubspan have combined to create a powerful new cloud based Software as a Service (SaaS) integration solution, called WebSpan, to address today's integration challenges so companies of all sizes can achieve their business objectives.  Download Now

SOA - Core Service
Thu, Feb 25, 2010

SOA is being the key architecture paradigm considered for implementing enterprise wide integration solutions, there is a strong demand from the customers to build core services that would lay the foundation for the business services hosting. I would like present the importance of core services areas, blue print and its value proposition and customer use case scenarios for some of the core services.

Ramesh Babu Palani is a SOA solution architect / application architect in Cognizant technology solutions where he plays multiple roles in the SOA projects across different domains that include BFS, Healthcare and Life science. He works with customer architecture team very closely to solve their technology pain points by providing SOA adopted practical solutions. He has been working on J2EE technology, SOA products from IBM, Oracle and TIBCO and business activity monitoring domain. He has conducted boot camps in IBM SOA technologies and TOGAF methodology for cognizant colleagues. He holds TOGAF, WebSphere Application Server SME, WebSphere Process Server, ebusiness solution designer and J2EE architect certifications. He is active member of WebSphere User Group, TOGAF forums and Enterprise Architects community.
 

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The architecture of a software system defines its primary structural and behavioral organization. A well designed and clearly documented architecture is a crucial pre-requisite for the successful implementation of a software system as well as for its subsequent evolution. In this talk, we examine how the new generation of model-based software engineering (MBSE) methods and technologies can be exploited to facilitate the specification and enforcement of software architectures. At the core of MBSE is the use of higher levels of abstraction and greater use of automation compared to more traditional development approaches.

Bran Selic is currently President and Founder of Malina Software Corp., and Director of Advanced Technology at Zeligsoft Limited. In 2007, Bran retired from IBM Canada, where he was an IBM Distinguished Engineer responsible for the strategic direction of IBM's software development tools. In addition, Bran is an adjunct professor of computer science at both the University of Toronto and at Carleton University in Canada.  He has over 35 years of practical industrial experience in designing and implementing large-scale software systems and has pioneered the application of model-based methods in real-time and embedded applications. In the past decade, Bran has led several international standards efforts related to modeling technologies, including the widely used UML 2 modeling language standard. A frequent invited and keynote speaker at various technical events, he is on the editorial board of two major scientific journals and has been the general and technical program chair of a number of technical conferences.

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Yesterday, I spent a good deal of the day reading and rereading the class action suit filed by the Robbins family against the Lower Marion School District. The suit alleges that the school invaded the privacy of Mr Robbins (who is 15) and other students of the school district. The schools had provided Mr Robbins and other students with laptops as a part of a program to bring e-learning opportunities to the student body. The laptops were installed with a webcam and can be remotely administered to take snapshots of whatever is in front of the camera. The system was installed to help track missing or stolen laptops but the case alleges that the schools used it for much more.

I believe this case represents a very significant moment for IT architects and technologists in general. The issues at stake are tremendously important and include the privacy and safety of minors, the potential for the abuse of privacy by government, security, as well as government IT policy which could impact millions if not billions of dollars worth of spend. There are so many elements to discuss that it would be difficult even to list them in a single post.

Let's start with a simple but interesting oversight on the part of the plaintiffs. They named 3 groups in the case; a) the school, b) the district and c) the superindendent of the school district. Many of you may not be aware but for some time I have been predicting that IT would begin being named in these types of cases. They did not do so in this particular case but other cases I have seen are leading us there. Here is a question, are any of the named individuals qualified to understand the privacy implications of a complex technology system? Even if your answer is yes, aren't the contractors and IT staff involved equally responsible and much more qualified for identifying and escalating such potential issues? If that is so, what is our (IT architects and IT staff) liability or culpability in these claims?

IASA will be following and pursuing the stakeholders in this case. In addition I will be forming a small leadership team to discuss these issues and what if any response IASA should make and where our responsibilities lie. I will be keeping you informed of any results we discover.

Follow up posts will include: IT architect liability and licensing issues, public inspection of IT systems, the 'doh! we didnt know response', and details on the case progression. 

Every five to ten years the world of computer programming faces a new paradigm shift, like GUI, object orientation, or generics. Right now we are facing the paradigm shift of parallel/multi-core computing. Successful research in this area has been done for the past 30 years, but we are still not using the results efficiently. A pattern is a working solution to a recurring problem, and parallel/multi-core programming has its own problems which has led to a set of patterns. Come to a session about which patterns exist in the area of parallel/multi-core programming and how they can be used with Visual Studio 2010.

Tiberiu Covaci started his developer career in 1991, but wasn't until 1994 that he got introduced into the Microsoft world of technologies. He moved from Romania to Sweden 1996, to work as a programmer. Since 2004 he is working as an independent trainer, teaching .NET technologies on all levels, but what he loves most is teaching introductory courses, because it gives him a chance to influence the future .NET programmers. He works closely with Microsoft, both as Subject Matter Expert for the MCPD exams, and Technology Reviewer in the new Microsoft .NET 4.0 courses that are under development. He is a member of the MCT Advisory Council, INETA Speaker, and INETA Country Lead for Sweden. After the success he encountered at TechDays 2009 in Sweden he developed a passion for speaking about new technologies, and that made him a very popular speaker at conferences like TechEd, DevReach, TechDays, Öredev, ScanDev and MCT Summit. He is interested in technologies like multi-core programming, ASP.NET, new programming languages and trends, and applications security. Whenever he gets the time, he blogs at http://blog.multi-core.net/.

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Track 1

George Paras, Principal, EAdirections
EA Profession: What's Changing and What's Not?

Thomas Philbin, Sr. Enterprise Architect, Dell
A Case Study: The Development & Application of an Architecture Framework at Dell

Mark Bodman, Troux Technologies
A Practical Approach to Strategic IT Planning and Value

Tannia Dobbins, Enterprise Architect, AMD
EA: The Information Story

Track 2

Jeffrey Palermo, CTO, Headspring
CCS Architecture: A Prescriptive Take On Line-Of-Business Web Application Structure

Brandon Satrom, Chief Architect, Thought Ascent
Paul Rayner, Solutions Architect & Principal, Virtual Genius, LLC
Keeping Architecture Relevant: Using Domain-Driven Design and Emergent Architecture to Mangae Complexity and Enable Change

Track 3

Srini Penchikala, Security Architect | Speaker
Agile Architect: Integrating Enterprise Architecture into Agile and Lean Software Development Enviroments

Srini Penchikala, Security Architect | Speaker
Security Architecture Policy Enforcement and EA Governance Using AspectJ and SpringAOP Techniques

In this presentation, I will talk about the significance of enforcing security architecture rules and how to implement an application security architecture governance process in software development projects. I will discuss a framework we created, using Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) techniques and tools like AspectJ, SpringAOP, Eclipse and AspectJ Development Toolkit (AJDT), to identify any coding deviations from standard security architecture rules and design policies. The security architecture enforcement module was created as part of the overall Enterprise Architecture Governance effort to comply with Enterprise Identity and Access Management (IAM) standards. The session will include discussion on how to enforce the security policies in the areas of Authentication, Authorization, and Role Based Access Control (RBAC) as well as Security Domain Driven Design and Factory Object patterns. It's also used to enforce the security policies at execution time when users login to the IT systems.

Bio
Srini Penchikala currently works as a Security Architect at a major financial organization in Austin area. He has over 15 years of IT experience and has been working on Java projects since 1996, J2EE technology since 2000 and SOA since 2006. His main areas of interest are Agile Enterprise and Service Oriented Architectures, Domain Driven Design and Development In Practice, Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP), Architecture Rules Enforcement, Enterprise Integration Patterns, and light-weight middleware frameworks such as Spring and Hibernate. Srini is one of the organizers of Detroit Java User Group (http://sites.google.com/site/detroitjug/). He has presented at several conferences (ITARC, SATURN, Project World, and NFJS Symposium) and published articles on J2EE topics on websites like InfoQ.com, ONJava, DevX Java, java.net and JavaWorld. Srini publishes a blog on Java, JEE, and other topics at http://srinip2007.blogspot.com/.

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This presentation is about fundamentals. Layering is a basic concept of IT architecture. Layers help to seperate dependencies and to decouple concerns. Most of the industry does layering in name only. It's lip service. In these slides and accompanying commentary we will explore the concepts of layering and isolation of dependencies and it's impact on the success of your architecture.


Speaker:
JEFFREY PALERMO is the CTO of Headspring Systems. Palermo  specializes in Agile management coaching and helps companies double the productivity of software teams. He is instrumental in the Austin software community as a member of AgileAustin and a director of the Austin .NET User Group.

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Ever wonder how a Fortune 50 company "does" enterprise architecture? Tom Philbin is responsible for defining the Enterprise Architecture framework currently in-place at Dell. He will talk about the benefits that having a comprehensive framework for EA can bring as well as the challenges their team faced along the way. During this web cast, you will gain insight into the value of a well-thought-out and well-implemented framework for Enterprise Architecture.



Speaker:
TOM PHILBIN has over 15 years experience as an IT developer, strategist and leader. Tom has transformed businesses using Information Technology to significantly reduce costs and improve business capability, primarily at Honeywell International and Dell Inc.  He has history of success leading people, generating value, establishing strategic goals and executing multiple complex programs. Most recently, Tom has played key roles in IT organization development, Architecting Dell's next-generation Supply Chain systems, developing Dell's Enterprise Architecture Framework, and rationalizing IT application portfolios at Dell and Honeywell. Tom's solutions have received industry awards (including the RealWare Award from InformationWeek's Intelligent Enterprise organization).  Tom has been a featured speaker at industry conferences for his novel use of technology to solve business problems (including conferences sponsored by Dell, Honeywell, IBM and the National Security Administration). Tom graduated with honors from the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and a Masters degree in Business administration, respectively.

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With the emergence and popularity of Service-Oriented Architecture, sometimes it is unclear when to use SOA and when to use a more advanced "SOA event-driven architecture." In this webcast, Nuno Godinho will cover the differences and trade-offs presented when applying these two approaches and show when to use each approach to maximize an application's quality attributes.



Speaker:
Nuno Godinho is an Independent Consultant responsible for helping customers to identify, plan, manage and develop software products and solutions. The majority of these software products and solutions are mission critical and use the Microsoft. NET platform from ASP.NET, Silverlight, Windows Forms, WCF, WF, WPF and even Mobility. He's been a speaker at major development events for Microsoft Portugal such as MSDN, TechDays and DevDays, covering subjects like ASP.NET, Silverlight, Windows Live Platform, Visual Studio and Windows Azure Service Platform, .NET Framework, as well as in International events like TechDays Worldwide Online and TechEd EMEA. Nuno has also been a Metro Instructor in topics like Visual Studio 2010, Windows Azure, Silverlight. His main services are Mentoring, Consulting and Advanced Training in areas like Solutions Architecture (SaaS, S+S, etc.), Development Methodologies (Scrum, MSF Agile and CMMI, FDD,TDD) and of course .NET Framework related technologies. His customers include public institutes, private companies, financial companies, and Microsoft Portugal. He's also an MVP in ASP.NET with blogs on http://pontonetpt.com/blogs/nunogodinho (Portuguese and English), http://weblogs.asp.net/nunogodinho (English and only about Web Development) and http://www.msmvps.org/blogs/nunogodinho (English) and http://xamlpt.com/blogs/nunogodinho (Portuguese), and also an INETA Speaker, INETA Country Leader for Portugal as well as Certified Scrum Master, MCT and so on.

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As you can imagine I read a lot of architecture related books, blogs, news postings and watch even more presentations both online and at our IT Architect Conferences. Over the last couple of years Ive noticed a trend in EA presentations that claim there enterprise architecture is not necissarily related to technology. In this model of our profession, enterprise architects, model the business, or my favorite "architect the enterprise".

After 7 years of speaking with and leading communities of practicing architects throughout the world, there is much that needs to be said about this trend. First, let's deal with the language element. As my friend Richard Hubert has passionately described, the word architecture is a noun and not a verb. The verb that these folks are looking for is to design. I know, I know, you are thinking, "Paul that's just an expression. Why would you care about semantics?" Over these last 7 years I have learned to take language very seriously. Fundamental definitions impact the fabric of our profession. For example, in the expression "architecting the enterprise", mistaking the word architecting with design describes a profession where the word architecture is synonymous with design. I posted on this a while back, but if architecture is design then it is NOT a profession as ANYONE can design.

Another issue with this expression is the position it claims inside a business. If we are "architecting the enterprise", what are all the other business people doing? And what exactly does that mean? Does it mean if I create a business process model that describes our sales channel, it's customers and products with all the associated meta-data that I have "architected" the sales channel? If I propose a change to that sales channel have I then "architected" it? This definition of architecture starts to sound suspicious almost from the get go. It looks very much like "architects" moving to the head of the business table as business consultants. The only issue there is that we already have plenty of business consultants, MBAs, business executives, etc and they are not at all interested in us moving to the head of the table. They already have working models of the enterprise in the form of financial models, HR models, sales forcasts, and yes business process models. The folks that are recommending this are missing two critical factors in our profession; 1) it was technology that got us a seat at the table in the first place, and b) there are many thousands more technology architects in the world than there are non-technology architects (think 99% to 1%).

So where did the technology go? What distinguishes these folks from other business consultants? And most importantly to me, what value does anyone get from their use of the term architecture? Worse, are they doing damage to the concept of architecture as technology strategy? Building and maintaining a technology strategy for a company is a huge task. It takes a ratio of 6-10% architects to IT staff. It generates huge profits and enables that much more. So why do people continue to run away from technology as a key value proposition? For those of us that deliver a working technology strategy and don't 'architect the enterprise', there is enough work to do without trying to escape to 'the business'.