Mike Walker's Blog: Japan Strategic Architecture Forum

April 14, 2008

Japan Strategic Architecture Forum - Day 2

So I am a little late with this content... But I have a good excuse :) The post is a bit delayed as there has been very limited internet connection at the resort. I guess in Japan a resort is really meant to be a resort. Meaning no connections with work. I like that idea...

The second and last day of the of the Japan Strategic Architecture Forum (SAF) had two keynotes from both a customer and Microsoft on the future of S+S.

Unfortunately the majority of the sessions were in Japanese so I can't give you a great recap of the events but I can share with you what the announcement was from my presentation.

Enterprise Architecture Toolkit Alpha Announcement

The Enterprise Architecture Toolkit (EATK) was announced at the the forum. The EATK pre-release is in Alpha release form. Initially, we will offering the EATK to a limited set of customers that are interested in the solution accelerator.

The EATK capabilities include:

Repository - Meta-data repository for uniting enterprise processes, storing existing architecture assets and a catalog for patterns (Software Factories in Microsoft terms or Architecture Building Blocks (ABB) in TOGAF ADM terms)
Architecture Management - Portal and Workflow assets that aid in the processes and govern architecture creation through the SDLC or through post production service management processes.
Strategy Management - Portal and Workflow that aid in the creation of as-is or current state architecture, to-be or future state architectures and the management of technology life cycles of architectures.
Community - Portal technologies that aid in the communication and collaboration, vetting of ideals through-out the enterprise, communication of Principles, Policies, Standards and Design Patterns, Add-Ins and Templates for architecture development.
Modeling - Usage scenarios for how to leverage Microsoft Visio to correlate architecture information from the Architecture Meta-Data Repository to Visio diagrams and shapes.

Since this is a solution accelerator the EATK capabilities are implemented as a series of scenarios.

Over the course of the next several months I will be publishing content to both the Microsoft Enterprise Architecture Portal and to my blog on how I feel the EATK addresses the various challenges of the EA space.

If you are interested in providing feedback, piloting or just having a conversation into this process, it isn't too late. Please send me an e-mail request at mikewalk [at] microsoft.com. We have a limited number of early adopter slots for both the Japanese and America geographies.

I have included my presentation in both Japanese and English below. I would encourage you to take a look and provide feedback to the overview of the tooling and concepts presented below. I may also include audio at some point.

Local Japanese Content

Below is the localized Japanese content for the customers and partners that attended the Strategic Architecture Forum.

EATK Poster