Intervista Journal

Business Process Trends Spotlight: Enterprise Architecture

Business Process Trends Spotlight this week is on Enterprise Architecture, and Proforma's David Ritter takes a historical view in his commentary.

David Ritter

[from Business Process Trends]

Enterprise Architecture has long been touted as one of the tools needed to bridge the gap between business and IT. Despite the fact that Enterprise Architecture concepts have been around since the early 1980s, their critical mission of defining and linking organizational strategy with business systems and technology architectures has rarely been achieved.

So what has caused the resurgence of interest in Enterprise Architecture over the past few years? Proforma believes that the methods and tools used to capture enterprise views of an organization have finally matured to the point where Enterprise Architecture efforts can deliver on their long-held promise of
aligning IT initiatives with business strategy.

Also included in this Spotlight is a bibliography of a number of articles, compiled by BPT's Paul Harmon.

Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City and Enterprise Architecture

Peter Lindberg recently reviewed Kevin Lynch's "The Image of The City" and draws some direct analogies with enterprise architecture:

[from Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City and Enterprise Architecture (Tesugen, Peter Lindberg’s Weblog/Blog)]

"These shapings or reshapings [of a city] should be guided by what might be called a "visual plan" for the city or metropolitan region: a set of recommendations and controls which would be concerned with visual form on the urban scale. The preparation of such a plan might begin with an analysis of the existing form and public image of the area, using the techniques rising out of this study [...]. This analysis would conclude with a series of diagrams and reports illustrating the significant public images, the basic visual problems and opportunities, and the critical image elements and element interrelations, with their detailed qualities and possibilities for change."

The "image" he writes about is the inhabitants image of the city (see "Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City and Software Architecture") and the elements are "paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks." Lynch continues:

"Such a plan should be fitted into all the other aspects of planning for the region, to become a normal and integral part of the comprehensive plan. Like all the other parts of this plan, it would be in a continuous state of revision and development."

Has anyone identified a set of fundamental elements relevant to the analysis of an enterprise and the creation of an enterprise architecture? In the book, Lynch describes weaknesses and strengths of cities' "imageability," very effectively, using these elements and their interrelations.

Software Productivity Consortium

The May issue of the Software Productivity Consortium's Newsletter, ArchitectureLine, is dedicated to the topic "What is EA?" Members and affiliates should get involved in the definitional process that the SPC is initiating, and those not allied with SPC will benefit from the highlevel aspects of their theorizing that are accessible to the general population.

"New draft paper for comment: What Is EA? Our latest paper argues that architecting an enterprise must be an ongoing, iterative activity, constantly reshaping the enterprise in small, incremental steps.

This position is based on two important characteristics that we think distinguish enterprise architecture (EA) and architecting from other types of systems architecting:

• The risks and constraints deriving from the goals and interactions of people in the enterprise are the primary drivers of EA. Yet these aspects of the enterprise are more difficult to identify and understand than hardware and software considerations.
  
• EA exists in a continually changing environment. An enterprise is in continual transformation (unless it is failing or already defunct). The technology is evolving, the business strategy is adjusting, the people are adapting. Therefore, the architecture of a vital enterprise always must be evolving.

While these characteristics are relevant to varying degrees for many systems, they are always dominant in EA. Therefore, they shape the practices of enterprise architecting as well. Although techniques from other types of architecting have value in EA, the self-adaptive nature of human-centered enterprises in changing environments pushes enterprise architecting toward evolutionary development.

A preliminary draft copy of this paper is available for review and comment. We invite Consortium members and affiliates to request a copy of this draft paper for review and comment. As always, we intend to incorporate your feedback in future versions of the paper."

The SPC group make a nod to the influence of Dr Barry Boehm, who is generally credited as the father of the "spiral model" of software development (see "A Spiral Model of Software Development and Enhancement." Computer [May 1988]: 61-72). but note that even he "has serious reservations about architecting a system in cycles, fearing that without sufficient up-front analysis, architects of large, complex systems would unwittingly design themselves into a corner."

Their enumeration of issues alone makes looking at their call for participation worth the effort:

"A quick summary of the most pressing architectural issues would have to include:

• How much design work should be done up front? How do we decide which decisions to commit to now and which to delay?
  
• Which system features or requirements do we consider in the initial architectural analysis and planning?
  
• How do we make tradeoffs among architectural provisions to ensure or improve performance for current capabilities versus preserving flexibility for potential future features and modifications?
  
• Will practices supportive of iterative architecting conflict with CMM/CMMI® compliance?"

US OMB Pushing Forward With EA Assessment

As recently reported, the US Office of Management and Budget's Federal Enterprise Architecture Program Management Office (FEAPMO) is continuing to move forward with assessment of federal government agencies enterprise architetures. The newest aspect of this push is the release of the FEAPMO assessment tool for the evaluation of enterprise architectures.

Jason Miller of GCN reported that

"The EA Assessment Framework Version 1.0 will let agencies rate the capability of their modernization blueprints. OMB said it complements the General Accounting Office’s EA Management Maturity Framework, which assesses EA capacity."

The FEAPMO's EA Assessement Framework (see PDF) seeks to mesaure the enterprise architecture relative to its orientation toward

• Change -- how well the architecture can support change
  
• Integration -- how well the architecture flexes through standardization of information, interoperation, interfaces, and connectivity
  
• Convergence -- how well the architecture accords with the agency's already established Technical Reference Model (TRM)
  
• Business Alignment -- how well the architecture ensures alignment with the agency's strategic intent.

We anticipate that there will be quite a lot of controversy about the assessment tool, and its application.

The Zachman Institute Announces 2004 EA Excellence Awards

ZIFA has announced that the application process for the 2004 EA Excellence Awards has opened. For more information, click here. The award will be presented at this year's ZIFA forum.

This award is presented by the Zachman Institute for Framework Advancement (ZIFA) and the Pinnacle Business Group, Inc. The recipients of the 2004 Awards will be invited to present at the Enterprise Architecture Forum in November.

We encourage public sector, private sector, consultant, and vendor submissions, as awards are presented in appropriate categories.

[Note: The ZIFA site does not support independent URLs for the various information pages, so you will just have to browse at www.ZIFA.com to find the content.]

Steven Spewak Dies

Steven Spewak, the well-known author of Enterprise Architecture Planning : Developing a Blueprint for Data, Applications, and Technology died on 26 April, in Alexandria VA, at 53.

Spewak had a powerful influence on the direction of enterprise architecture thinking, especially in government.

GCN on Popkin’s System Architect Follows Federal EA Model

A recent interview with Popkin Software's Jan Popkin shed light on the growing need for EA tools to support the Federal EA model:

"[Popkin Software's] System Architect 9.2 has an option for automating business-case reporting to match the Federal Enterprise Architecture reference model, said Jan Popkin, chief executive officer of the New York company.

An analysis feature called Enterprise Explorer Diagram visually depicts relationships among applications, technologies and locations, Popkin said. Via open-standard Scalable Vector Graphics images, it highlights redundant and overlapping systems. The Depiction Manager lets users globally change the symbols that represent systems in the framework to speed editing.

...

The optional FEA Reference Model Support interface organizes an agency’s enterprise architecture to comply with Office of Management and Budget requirements, Popkin said. The company will update the software as OMB revises its FEA reference models."

We plan to touch base with Popkin Software on these developments in the near-term.

Ken Orr on "Extending Zachman"

Ken Orr, a Fellow of the Cutter Business Technology Council, has authored a report entitled "Extending Zachman: Enterprise Architecture and Strategic IT Planning." [Strangely enough, Cutter hasn't entered the report into its database online, so we cannot offer a link to the report at this time.]

"Those of us engaged in long-range IT planning simply have to do a better job. Too much is riding on the decisions we make today. Enterprise architecture, based on an extended Zachman Framework, provides a basis for top decision makers to take both broader and longer-term views of their IT asset bases. In a time when more than half of corporate capital expenditures are for IT, this is particularly important. We're already seeing IT planning that makes more sense. For example, we're finding it easier to explain to top management why some projects (e.g., core business applications and infrastructure initiatives) are more important than others to the organization as a whole and why the investments are worth the money. Over time, we're finding that the process is becoming easier as we develop better frameworks, methods, and tools. IT planning will never be easy, but, hey, that's why we get paid the big bucks."

Ken is taking the tack that we need to do a better job in strategic It thinking, and that enterprise architure forms a keystone of that activity.

Sears CEO Alan Lacy: Outsourcing "Commodity Knowledge Work"

At a recent BearingPoint sponsored event, Sears CEO Alan Lacy spoke on outsourcing, in what may be the emerging conventional wisdom among US CEOS. As reported in ComputerWorld, Lacy said

"I think that we're still in the early days of this, and we had some outsourcing capabilities or functions that could be outsourced for quite a while," he said. "But I do think that we're early in the cusp of any celebration on this.

"I think that lots of companies are going to focus on cost structure, and I think, just particularly from an IT standpoint, every year we always have more IT projects than we can rationally afford to invest behind. And it's often the case that ... administrative functions fall to the bottom end of that prioritization scheme that you want to develop behind sales growth or margin expansion or customer data or what have you. And the administrative stuff kind of falls to the end.

"And I think that the fact that we now have potentially the ability to outsource to people who this is their business, they're going to have an incentive -- because it is their business to keep more state-of-the-art in terms of the quality of the financial systems, the HR systems and so on. I think that to some degree, just the nature of IT spending is that we have scarce resources in IT. Resources being scarce is going to lead to, I think, acceleration of outsourcing for some of the more administrative-like functions.

"But I think, beyond that, to me, a very interesting trend right now is the whole non-U.S. opportunity that's available, and ... if you think about personal intelligence and drive being randomly distributed by population -- you know, there are four or five times as many smart, driven people in China than there are in the U.S. And there's another four or five, three or four times as many people in India that are smarter or as smart or have more drive. And if technology is now going to basically reduce location as a barrier to competition, then essentially you've got something like whatever that was, seven or nine times, more smart, committed people that are now competing in this marketplace against certain activities.

"So, I think that the outsourcing potential -- particularly of some of the more commodity-like knowledge worker activities -- we're just beginning to see the first of that curve. I think that, just given the nature of technology and given the nature of those workforces, and given the fact that we've had a decrease in the supply, prices are going to fall.

"So we're going to see, I think, this huge incentive to shift some of these more commodity-like, knowledge worker jobs offshore." "

The question is:What is commodity knowledge work? We hold that most design-related activities are very difficult -- if not impossible -- to outsource, but even lower-level IT activities -- like programming -- turn out to be very hard to outsource in the absense of well-developed and articulated architecture.

Lacy's organization subsequently recanted much of what he said, and ven stated that Sears does not have outsourcing plans in the works. In the politically charged environment that currently surrounds IT outsourcing, however, it is hard to imagine getting the straight word from a US corporate board room, at least until the electiopns are over in November.

Popkin SAUG Announces New Commercial Special Interest Group

Popkin Software has announced formation of Commercial Special Interest Group (SIG) as a part of the already established System Architect User Group-North America (SAUG). For more information, please visit the SAUG website: http://www.saug-usa.org.

GAO Says E-Government Initiaitives fall Short

In a recent InformationWeek article, Eric Chabow GAO: Administration Too Optimistic On Success Of E-Government

"The General Accounting Office told a House subcommittee Wednesday that the administration might have been overly optimistic about achieving one of the President Bush's management priorities: E-government.

Overall, the GAO--Congress' investigative arm--gave the White House Office of Management and Budget mixed grades in achieving the 91 objectives originally defined for the 25 OMB-sponsored E-government initiatives.

"Given that OMB's stated criteria in choosing these initiatives included their likelihood of deployment in 18 to 24 months, the substantial number of objectives that are still unmet or only partially met indicates that making progress on these initiatives is more challenging than OMB may have originally anticipated," said Linda Koontz, GAO's information management issues director, in remarks prepared for delivery to the House Government Reform Committee's Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations, and the Census."

Seems that those projects that have brought in more stakeholders, and established a better working collaboration among all invoved -- cutting across agencies -- have fared better.

This accords well with what we have learned about enterprise architecture and its realization, and the Government's challenges to deliver on E-government are serious:

"[Karen] Evans, the highest-ranking IT executive in government [OMB's administrator for E-government and IT], defended the presidential E-government initiatives as having delivered measurable results to citizens. More is to come. "Through the analysis of the federal enterprise architecture," she said, "we have launched five task forces which are laying the foundation for future opportunities to improve service, reduce costs and identify duplicative investments."

We'll keep our eye on that.

Erecting the Framework - Interview with John Zachman

John Zachman was recently interviewed by Dan Ruby, and (as usual) he has a lot to offer:

"You can engineer the enterprise just like you can engineer anything else." So says John Zachman, the retired IBM executive whose groundbreaking 1987 and 1993 articles are widely credited with founding the discipline of enterprise architecture and led to the development of The Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture.

Click here to read the entire interview.

Job Posting: Enterprise Architect

Received a recent job posting:

We are a search firm in Charleston, SC. One of our clients, one of the top four technical companies in the world, is inaugurating a Business Technology Architecture Group, and they are seeking candidates for the position of Enterprise Architect . The salary package is compelling, consisting of a significant base salary, a cash bonus, and a significant equity position. While the entire job description is pasted below, following is a summary of specific requirements: · Former CTO or Chief Architect or Partner/Associate Partner in technology focused consulting practice

· Minimum 12-15 years of combined industry and consulting experience

· Experienced track record working with senior executives within Fortune 500 companies

· Professional services delivery management history

· Deep focus in an industry (preferred Financial Services or Manufacturing) and/or horizontal solution area (CRM, WO, SCM, IT Ops etc)

· Experience of preparing and executing Global technology plans and deployments

· Minimum of 4 years of Internet business solution implementation

· History of successful mentoring and coaching of resources

· Distinctive career history problem solving and issue resolution

· Experience with project management methodology such as Rational desired

· Executive presence

I'd be indebted to you if you would you be so kind as to circulate this information among your professional contacts. Interested candidates are invited to send me their resume as a WORD attachment.

Many thanks for your assistance!

Best regards,

Joyce C. Harder
President
Recruiting Support Services, Inc. (RSS)
Stellar Candidate Identification and Development
Tel. 843-884-5944 Fax 843-884-4378
jharder@recruitingsupportservices.com

"Line of Sight" in Enterprise Architecture

Rick Murphy writes in Enterprise Architect about some of the key aspects of aligning of business strategy with architectural models through extending the semantics of modeling formalisms. His piece focusses on UML metamodels, but one concept -- the idea of Line of Sight -- has broad applicability.

Achieving Line of Sight

In his keynote speech before an e-government conference last fall in Washington, DC, Norman Lorentz, outgoing chief architect of the Office of Management and Budget, identified line of sight as one of the key challenges for the FEA. Lorentz described line of sight as the ability for executives to see the significance and outcome of strategy, mission, and business drivers at all levels of the FEA.

The FEA program management office defines line of sight as "the indirect or direct cause-and-effect relationship from a specific IT investment to the processes it supports, and by extension the customers it serves and the mission-related outcomes it contributes to." Regardless of whether the framework is Zachman, FEAF, TOGAF, EAP, DODAF, or another, enterprise architects visualize the intent of an information technology investment in their artifacts.
This visualization is especially important where artifacts cross levels of abstraction. Enterprise architects empower executives to see through the levels and build credibility by modeling the intent of an information technology investment across all levels of abstraction.

The ability to discern these 'line of sight' relationships between business objectives and their means (such as IT goals and investments) and architectural components is an absolutely essential aspect of visibility and transparency in enterprise architecture modeling, whatever the formalism applied.

Understanding Enterprise Architecture (Led by John Zachman and Stan Locke)

Core fundamentals course to help team members understand key concepts of Enterprise Architecture, the Zachman Framework and where other frameworks and methodologies fit, as well as an introduction to Business Architecture and a review of implementation strategies

Washington, DC - April 19-23, 2004
Toronto, ON - May 17-21, 2004
Atlanta, GA - May 24-28, 2004

For more information and registration, click here.

EA: Son of CASE?

I read an interesting commentary by Jeff Tash at Enterprise Architect, suggesting that EA has emerged from the ruins of CASE (Computer Aide Software Engeineering), but one that I disagree with almost completely:

"Why did CASE fail so miserably? And, what does this ancient history have to do with what's happening in IT today?

I'm convinced that what killed CASE were too many promises by too many vendors. The technology was utterly unable to live up to its own wildly unrealistic expectations. Back in the 1980s, all the pundits were pontificating about "automating automation." Everyone wanted to ride the coattails of W. Edwards Deming, an engineer who made phenomenal contributions to the field of manufacturing with his seminal work on "continual quality improvement."

The basic premise behind CASE is that software development is a form of manufacturing—albeit one that most closely resembles a job shop. Successful manufacturing requires a well-defined process along with a bill-of-materials list of parts and/or subassemblies needed at each and every step of that process. Together these provide the grist that fuels Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)."

Actually, nearly all business process-oriented thinking of the 70s and 80s was based on emulation of the success of lean manufacturing and supply chain automation, but that's really neither here nor there.

The basic proposition that Tash makes is that CASE was a "failure." My belief is that all software engineering today has become 'computer-aided' -- by comparison with the days of manual flowcharts and punchcards, this is clearly true. Nealry all software development is automated today, with source code control, testing tools, and, yes, modeling techniques like EA and UML to characterize the behavior of software.

The fact that a trend has become so central to everyday reality that it is almost not mentioned -- like democracy in the US, or the use of computerized tools to support software design and development -- does not mean that the concept has failed. On the contrary.

Tash concludes by stating that CASE hasn't died, it has just assumed an alias: EA.

"I'm personally quite troubled by the morphing of CASE into EA. I have a problem when experts insist that EA must be top-down and the process formally defined. Blindly following this approach will almost assuredly lead to the same fate as CASE. EA, itself, is still an incredibly immature discipline. It's not ready for the rigors of formally defined processes and statistically sampled metrics. I prefer more eclectic approaches where EA can be practiced in a manner more akin to what's referred to in the world of software development as "agile modeling."

When it comes to EA and CASE, I urge you to be cautious. Let me remind you of the old adage, "if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.""

I am inclined to go along with Tash on the "agile modeling" observation, although we have been wrestling with large-scale software architectures for far too long for him to say that it is "incredibly immature." And his parting comment is simply anti-punditry: taking a potshot at a promising discipline based on the fact that other, once-promising ideas supposedly didn't pan out.

I would agree that very few companies have made much money on software tools -- leaving aside the monsters like Microsoft, IBM/Rational, and a few others along the way. But that is more a function of the food pyramid: there are really not enough programmers to support hundreds of successful companies. The fact that many dozens have decided to try to compete in theis market only leads to unhappy investors and 'promises broken' when planned product features fail to materialize. Lamentably, Tash got that side of it right.

Zachman: Federated Architecture White Paper

John Zachman's recent white paper on Federated Architecture (edited by Stan Locke) is available from the publisher, Intervista.

From the introduction:

"There is something very useful about the idea of Federated Architecture because in complex enterprises where there are a multiplicity of diverse business units, not only does it present complex management challenges, but the dissipation of energy and resources through sub-optimization and duplication can be extravagant.

When such a complex Enterprise comes under the heavy stress of dramatic, increased demand, and increased complexity of that demand, coupled with high rates of change and constrained resource availability, there is a great deal of incentive to leverage as much commonality as possible (i.e. Enterprise optimization as opposed to Enterprise suboptimization) while at the same time continuing to provide for substantial diversity as required … a classic case of a federal system of government. There are some things you want optimized (common) and some things you want sub-optimized (not common). You are strongly incented to minimize the energy and resources dissipated through duplication, internal disorder and discontinuities. At the same time you are encouraged to support the diversity of unique environmental demands. The question is, what is to be common and what is to be not common."

Federal Enterprise Architecture - Program Management Office (FEAPMO)

The Federal Enterprise Architecture Program Management Office has announced the launch of FEAMS (Federal Enterprise Architecture Management System) User Group:

"The FEA PMO is pleased to announce the launch of the FEAMS User Group as the next step toward bringing FEAMS online to agencies. The user group is part of the Phase II pilot in the development of the web-based Federal Enterprise Architecture Management System (FEAMS). The kick-off meeting is scheduled for Thursday, February 12.

The Phase II pilot will focus on receiving feedback from the user community on how FEAMS can best provide a government-wide capability to help Federal agencies identify opportunities for IT collaboration.

An email invitation has been sent to all individuals identified by their agencies to participate in this effort. If you have questions about your agency's participation in the FEAMS pilot, please contact your CIO. For general information on FEAMS, please email support@feapmo.gov."

GAO Survey: Office of the President at Level 5 of EA Maturity Model

Government Computer News reports that the Office of the President is the only agency of those surveyed by the GAO to meet its requirements for Stage 5 as defined in version 1.1 of the audit agency's Maturity model.

"The IT team for EOP—which includes approximately 2,800 employees in 14 separate organizations such as the Office of Management and Budget, National Security Council and the Office of the Trade Representative—credits the architecture with helping it set a plan for consolidating four disparate e-mail systems by spring.

The plan also led the White House team to modify an electronic records management system that it already was implementing rather than buy a potentially duplicative one.

“We felt we met enough provisions to be in Stage 5, but we weren’t sure if we would make it,” CIO Carlos Solari said. “It is a matter of getting people to participate and understanding the importance of this. There is nothing fancy about it but good executive level support and staying focused.”"

The level of immaturity of most agencies' enterprise architecture activities is perhaps the real story: 76 of 93 agencies are at stage 1 of the maturity model:

"“I was surprised there wasn’t more progress,” given the Office of Management and Budget’s emphasize on the architectures and the money that agencies have pumped into these efforts, said Randy Hite, GAO’s director of IT architecture and systems issues.

The problem is that the work is spotty, GAO found, noting that agencies have met some of the requirements of the latter stages but not enough of the requirements to push their plans up the maturity scale. GAO said about 80 percent of agencies were performing eight core elements of stages 2 and 3, according to the report, Information Technology: Leadership Remains Key to Agencies Making Progress on Enterprise Architecture Efforts."

Visible Analyst Promotion

Visible Analyst is running a special promotion until January 31 2004 on Visible Analyst Enterprise

Purchase the new Visible Analyst Enterprise Framework Edition by January 31st and receive up to a 50% discount on quantity purchases ( 3 or more licenses ).