Mike Walker's Blog

Open Group SOA Governance Framework

The Open Group SOA Governance Framework provides context and definitions to enable organizations to understand and deploy SOA Governance. It describes SOA Governance; defines an SOA Governance Reference Model (the SGRM) and its constituent parts; and defines the SOA Governance Vitality Method (SGVM), which assists an organization in customizing the SGRM to realize its customized SOA Governance regimen.

 

This generic reference model for SOA governance is provided as a standard, to be used by companies to create (and constantly monitor and update) their own specific governance model and best practices. The SOA governance framework may be used in the context of another governance framework, such as COBIT or ITIL; the SOA working group did a mapping of COBIT to this framework as part of the framework development process, and plan to do more in the future in order to help organizations preserve their investment in COBIT/ITIL training and implementation.

The SOA Governance Framework will be available here for free download:

http://www.opengroup.org/bookstore/catalog/c093.htm

 

Technorati Tags: SOA,Goverance,Frameworks,Enterprise Architecture,Open Group

ArchiMate 1.0 from Open Group, first global language for modeling

It’s official, ArchiMate version 1.0 under the control of the Open Group will be released at the London event in a week. It looks like that is when all the materials will be released publicly online.

Press Release: http://www.opengroup.org/press/21apr09.htm

ArchiMate NEW Home Page: http://www.opengroup.org/archimate/

 

If you are a follower of my blog you will see that I have been watching ArchiMate for some time now. I am very excited that this has been embraced in a larger standards body and am looking forward to it’s growth and maturity.

Right now ArchiMate snaps nicely with the B. Business Architecture, C. Information Systems Architecture, and D. Technology Architecture. But there is more coverage needed across the ADM and detailed aspects of phase B, C, and D.

 

I sat in a great overview session of ArchiMate yesterday from Remco Blom at BiZZdesign where they talked through a lot of this and showed how extensible the standard is. I do hope that they share the webcast to everyone.

One area they focused on was “ArchiMate +” which is what you can do to extend Archimate. See the example below:

 

There was also a thread on Nick Malik’s blog regarding a potential conflict between UML and ArchiMate. I commented on this thread but as of right now it isn’t showing. It may not of been approved yet. But the reader digest version of it is that I think the there is no conflict as ArchiMate is all about the macro-level modeling whereas UML and other standards like it are about the micro-level modeling details. They are complementary in that sense. Could there be overlap, sure. But I think it is up to the architect to draw the line where he/she wants to stop as far as modeling abstraction is concerned. The only area I do see potential conflict is with MDA/MOF, but frankly I haven’t seen a whole lot of uptake of that lately. Personally, I am not a big fan of MDA but rather more of the loosely coupled MDD approaches that allow for multi-views and viewpoints.

 

Previous ArchiMate Posts:

• ArchiMate - The Emerging Architecture Modeling Standard?
• http://www.mikethearchitect.com/2009/03/mapping-current-state-architectures-across-the-enterprise.html
• TOGAF 9 Release and Impressions

 

Technorati Tags: Enterprise Architecture,ArchiMate,Modeling

What EA Framework Do You Use?

Serge Thorn posted a poll on LinkedIn for companies to chime in on what EA frameworks they use. For those of you that use one of the major frameworks you should definitely enter it into the poll. The results benefit us all. So far there are 136 responses (as of today) with TOGAF in the lead with 61% and Zachman at 18%. So far it's a pretty big gap.

You can find the poll here: http://polls.linkedin.com/p/13540/ikhnz

Technorati Tags: Enterprise Architecture, Frameworks

Extended Enterprise Architecture Framework (E2AF) Template

Mike Kavis posted a high level cheat sheet for the Extended Enterprise Architecture Framework (E2AF) on his blog today. Here is the description from his post:

I Basically took all of the topics from the E2AF matrix and built a document with bullets representing each topic. It is organized by the six key questions (Why, With Who, What, How, With What, and When) and has sub categories for each question by the four different view points (Business, Information, Information Systems, Technology Infrastructure). In Appendix A, I included several links to the website where the E2AF information can be found.  Appendix B lists all of the E2AF deliverables.

I am really happy to see Mike Kavis is making this framework more actionable. As you could probably tell from my comments from TOGAF, I see that one of the biggest issues with these frameworks is the execution angle. In general, the template that was posted could be applied to other frameworks or even homegrown efforts as well.

My only critique would be that while the template provided by Mike definitely has all the placeholders and high level areas that are needed to be addressed it will still take some time for folks to digest all the data that needs to go in those placeholders. I would suggest putting more detail around the information that needs to be gathered in each section to help new people to E2AF or any other EA discipline understand what kind of data goes into each section. Either way it’s still a great free template to use as one of the tools in your EA Toolbox.

You can download the document here as a zipped file from his post.

 

Technorati Tags: Enterprise Architecture,E2AF

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Can you Easily Compare EA Frameworks?

Have you ever tried to compare EA frameworks? How do you compare and are all frameworks the same. The reader digest version of the answer is: No... Not all frameworks are the same but rather have there own definitions of what they are to deliver.

I have in the past and I have found it very challenging because it is a bit like comparing apples and oranges. When I talk to customers and folks internally about EA frameworks there is a great deal of confusion with current comparisons found online. Below is a common example:

source: http://www.mkern.com/whatisea/frameworks.html

This comparison  really doesn't tell us much detail. Although there is a whitepaper called A Comparison of the Top Four Enterprise-Architecture Methodologies on the MSDN EA Architecture Center we have the same issue with comparing these framework with the same base criteria:

This isn't to say these don't provide value, they do from a macro level. However, the real challenge here is that these frameworks are fundamentally trying to solve different problems all together.

I see that there are two major types of frameworks:

• General Purpose Frameworks - What sets these types of frameworks apart from others is that they are trying to solve the broader problem the enterprises are having. These frameworks do so by being agnostic to any specific implementation. They have no specific business drivers (enterprise specific) but rather are capability based. These frameworks are generally driven by industry consortia such as Open Group.
• Domain Specific Frameworks - Frameworks that are derived from an EA effort are refereed to as Domain Specific. These frameworks were derived with a predefined set of business concerns in mind because they originated from an EA office or process improvement effort in a government or an enterprise. Largely these frameworks are driven by government agencies such as the US government or other geographies.

So how does the actual frameworks fit into these buckets.

General Purpose Framework	Domain Specific Framework
TOGAF	FEAF
Agile EA	DODAF
Zachman	MODAF
	TEAF
	...

Should you eliminate one of these types form your efforts? Absolutely not. These frameworks have very specific value propositions. But we first need to know how they are fundamentally different.

As shown above there are two basic characteristics. We look at the allowable level of customization vs. prescriptive guidance. These frameworks slide down the continuum from the level and ability to customize to the level of prescriptive guidance. The general purpose framework has a greater level of flexibility as it is attempting to solve all problems. Whereas the Domain Specific Framework is solving the problem with a series of predefined set of forces and attributes.

For example: A government based framework such as FEAF / TEAF / FEAF will be based on the specific government based regulatory laws (region based), a set of operating and organizational models that is specific to that agency. These will drive out the process and artifacts required to fulfil these base business drivers.

So what do you get with these different types of frameworks? With these two classifications of frameworks there are a set of artifacts, methods and tools that are derived. These are derived on the the base problem sets defined earlier. Since these are derived, the outputs can be very different. See below:

General Purpose Frameworks:

• Defines an open and consistent definition of terminology through taxonomies and ontology.
• Agnostic to organizational structure
• Low level process agnostic
  • SDLC
  • PMO
  • Service Management
  • etc.
• Very configurable to enterprises

Domain Specific Frameworks:

• Prescriptive guidance for:
  • Organizational structures
  • Processes
  • Artifacts
• Usually deliver lots of templates
• Lots of real world examples

Is the comparison of EA Frameworks like comparing Apples and Oranges? Yes it is. When you compare these frameworks they should not be treated the same nor should be judged based on the same criteria. Rather they should be correlated with your specific requirements. 

Technorati Tags: Enterprise Architecture,Frameworks

Governance For Your OBA's

In last weeks session I was asked about governance and OBAs (at least from a server side perspective). I am happy to report that the community is concerned with governance as well. Microsoft IT Team Site Life Cycle Management Beta 1 was created on Codeplex and is intended to provide governance and manageability samples and tools designed to help IT Professionals management SharePoint Products and Technologies deployments. 

Upcoming tools include an implementation of site/web lifecycle management based on the Site Delete and Confirmation feature, the Microsoft IT Site Delete Capture 1.0 feature, and additional out-of-the-box functionality.  A sample auditing configuration solution deployment package will be introduced in the September-October timeframe that provides guidance on auditing and the management of content types across site collections.

Check out some of more governance content:

SharePoint Technology Governance Information on TechNet

SharePoint Governance posts on Joel's Blog

Manageability and Governance Post

Key Governance Considerations

Information Policies and Auditing Post

Information Architecture Post

Logical Architecture Samples

 

Tags: OBA

Can you build a Configuration Management OBA?

As you can see from my previous post I was asked if you could build an OBA to address CM concerns. This is actually a great idea. If you build an OBA to address configuration management it would definitely work. Now I am not going to give CM enough justice with this post however I promise I'll revisit these aspects as it relates to EA.

To build a CMDB and a configuration management process around OBA you have to look at a few areas.

• First, the repository. That's the easy part and you can use SQL Server for that. The only trick here is figuring out a schema. However if you use ITIL that wouldn't be much of an issue.
• The second piece of the puzzle is the modeling of the process and your assets. and multiple other tools to model your assets. Whether that is a shape tool like Visio (which in the new version can support ITIL shapes).

Other options include commercial Add-Ins for Visio from http://en.it-processmaps.com

• Third is the support of the process. This is where OBA's excel with Human Workflow. It is very easy to integrate into existing processes such as approval and escalation processes can integrate into productivity tools easily. Using Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) you can intelligently route issues to appropriate users based on their role within an identity store. Task management is simplified with MOSS since we can build these lists centrally to manage. It also makes a compelling story around management of these issues such as if they are open too long, past due, or stagnant, WF can notify appropriate IT or issue owners. This makes the process as unobtrusive as possible in a process intensive environment.
• Forth is the visualization of your assets in many different views. Using Visio you can visualize the infrastructure in a variety of ways even if the clients do not have Visio on the desktop. Additionally, with PerformancePoint or Excel Services you can create enterprise templates that support your process or can enable your IT to create self-service report creation, event simulation and KPIs. 
• And lastly, reconcilement of data across existing CMDB's is a function easily preformed by SSIS (or any ELT/ETL tool you may have) and or reaching out to federated data. The latter option can be achieve by using the CMDB as partly a metadata repository.

Tags: OBA EA ITIL Frameworks

TechEd Australia Wrap-up

First thanks to everyone whom came to my sessions at TechEd. Other thanks goes out to folks in the blogosphere talking about the session. The first session was standing room only! I have two more on the same topics in New Zealand.

In the presentations I talked a lot about the separation of human and system workflow and demonstrating that MOSS is a great platform for exposing Service Oriented Architectures.

From an architecture perspective I talked about how OBAs are really composite applications. Below you will find the "Formula for Composite Architectures" you'll see OBA in the middle.

I received some great feedback and questions on my OBA talk. Here are some of the questions that were asked:

What if we can not invest in MOSS right away, can we still build OBAs? Yes, you can leverage WSS services, build ribbons and task panes. However, it will be limiting compared to building off of the MOSS platform. Additionally, OBAs are not just Office 2007 clients either. You can build OBAs from Office 2003 version assets. You will quickly find out there that there is a strong business case to move to the new version.

Can OBAs help with Configuration Management? This was an interesting question. OBAs in and of themselves can't help with configuration management. However that is like contrasting database technology with that subject. The answer is YES you can build them and YES you can buy them. If you want to buy a  solution rather than build it you can check out: http://www.enterpriseinformatics.com/sharepoint.shtml. They specialize in this area. They have a great picture that describes how they complement our product.

 

What is the long term plans for OBA? If I build one today will something new come along and obsolete it? Well there is always a chance of that further down the line, however Microsoft has a very strong dedication to OBAs. We will further define OBAs and how they integrate with LOB solutions with LOBi. There will be a plethora of new features in Office 14 around this integration. So the short answer is OBAs are here to stay for awhile.

In summary I received some great feedback on the OBA RAP for Loan Origination Systems. There was two customers that personally approached me that said this is exactly what they were looking for to solve their problems in this space. I am happy to of helped those of you in this space.

 

Tags: OBA EA ITIL Frameworks

Australian Government Architecture Reference Models (v1.0)

The Australian Government Architecture (AGA) is intended to assist in the delivery of more consistent and cohesive services to citizens and support the more cost-effective delivery of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) services by government, providing a framework that:

• provides a common language for agencies involved in the delivery of cross-agency services;
• supports the identification of duplicate, re-usable and sharable services;
• provides a basis for the objective review of ICT investment by government; and,
• enables more cost-effective and timely delivery of ICT services through a repository of standards, principles and templates that assist in the design and delivery of ICT capability and, in turn, business services to citizens.

This AGA Reference Models document describes the first release (Version 1.0) of the reference models that will form the basis of a common language between agencies and structure a repository of architectural artifacts (including standards, guidelines, designs and solutions) that may be utilized by agencies to deliver an increasing range of WofG services.

The AGA Reference Models are managed by the Department of Finance and Administration, through AGIMO, in consultation with the Chief Information Officer Committee and the Australian Government Services Architecture Working Group.

Version 1.0 of the reference models was endorsed by the Chief Information Officer Committee on 5 April 2007, and contains the Service, Data and Technical Reference Models. The Performance and Business Reference Models will be progressively developed and released in future versions.

Requests and suggestions for change to these reference models should be forwarded to AGIMO at aga@finance.gov.au.

Australian Government Architecture Reference Models [ - 2.5MB]The taxonomies for the Service and Technical Reference Models have been provided in a graphical from as mind maps. These can be downloaded in PDF or Image format.

Service Reference Models [ - 37KB] | Image Format [144KB]

Technical Reference Models [ - 16KB] | Image Format [52KB]

 

Tags: Enterprise Architecture