Mike Walker's Blog

Gartner EA Summit - Day 2

As for the second day of coverage of the EA summit I attended less sessions and did more talking with other architects at the conference so I will not have a whole lot to say about most of the sessions.

I did observe that there was quite the drop-off between day 1 and day 2 for some reason. I am not sure if it was due to work pressures by their employers or if there were other reasons (economy?).

SOA and EA Lessons Learned

This was another good session from Nick Gall. There was a great deal of discussion around further definition of SOA and then led into a case study discussion of what others have done. For me this was the best part of the presentation. It was good to see what has and hasn't worked for companies. What I didn't see in the presentation was the alignment of SOA and EA. It through me off and was expecting something different. A rename of the session would of done the trick in my opinion.

The Best Enterprise Architects Don’t Work Too Hard

In my opinion this was one of the best sessions at the conference. Brian Burke really got to the heart of the matter with this one. He put some really grounding around building, maturing and sustaining an EA practice at all levels. This wasn't the typical "Build it and they will come" type of pitch but a much more pragmatic approach. I agreed with 100% of what he had to say. I have some scares on my back from living trough some of the mistakes but I think we all have in some way...

I like that he is so candid in this presentation where he talks about not fighting battles you can't win, don't try to change an unchangeable organization. It's was very good for folks in all different ranges between just starting an EA practice to being in the trenches dealing with adoption/political issues.

I'm not sure if Brian will be writing more on this topic but hopefully he will present and write more on this topic. If you have access to Gartner they are worth a look.

• Organize Your Enterprise Architecture Effort: Tips for Game Planning and Launching the EA Program
• Predicts 2008: Emerging Trends Force a Clearer and Deeper Focus on Enterprise Architecture
• Architecting the Emergent Enterprise: New Game, New Rules

Cloud Computing - How Getting “Served” will Alter Your Architectural Plans

This was one of those really meaty sessions that I will not be able to give a whole lot of details on unfortunately. Darryl Plummer did a great job of articulating this space. He went into defining the cloud and demystifying it a bit. I thought this was a message that was very much needed. Here at Microsoft we have defined the cloud in a similar way but they take a more holistic industry approach which is good for architects that are looking at wiring up multiple clouds or trying to differentiate between different cloud platforms.

An area that is explored in some detail was how the architecting process and architecture decisions change when developing solutions for the cloud. This is an area in which I would like to talk more about as well. I think this is the higher order bit, more important than trying to create the all-up definition of the cloud. The reality is that there isn't going to be one major cloud, there are going to be several major cloud vendors and most companies will leverage multiple clouds for various purposes.

I really liked his presentation and thought it was one of the top presentations at the conference. As a side note, I would really like to see a wiring up of this presentation and with a presentation that David Chappell presented on at an internal Microsoft conference called TechReady that was based on "a short introduction to cloud platforms" paper he had wrote. Blending the holistic space with architecture classifications and styles would be ideal.

Summary

So in summary, the conference was a bit different than others in the past. When looking at the agenda it was really obvious the lack of SOA and ESB tracks. It seems as if Gartner is backing away from SOA a bit. The SOA tracks were filled with relatively new concepts. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, it's actually refreshing to see some diversification.  However, I wonder if there are other motivations such as a negative market trend towards SOA. I didn't hear this from Gartner, but one has to wonder if there analysis is surfacing data like this. Time will tell...

As I have stated above and in other posts, I am happy to see a more pragmatic Gartner. A few years ago I remember have consults with them and hearing that tools such as Word and Visio should not be used in EA. Now the tone has changed a bit. I had counted five sessions where EVP Tools (i.e., Office Productivity tools such as Microsoft Office) should be leveraged at certain levels of maturity. I think this is spot on. Use a tool until you outgrow it. Just because you start out using Visio doesn't mean that you will always be using it. I think this was driven home in the key note where they pulled some data from the April 2008 EA Market Survey that stated:

72% are interested in EA Tools - with 80% of you still using the "EVP tool suite" and an intranet site

My time in London was filled with great conversations with some really smart architects and I want to thank all the folks that I was able to connect with and gain new perspectives on this radically evolving space of enterprise architecture. See all of you at the next event!

 

Technorati Tags: Enterprise Architecture,Gartner,Cloud,Events

ArchiMate - The Emerging Architecture Modeling Standard?

At the Gartner EA Summit in London it seemed like there was quite a bit of talk on the solution showcase floor regarding an architecture modeling standard called Archimate. I'm not sure if this was due to the fact that this was a European event (ArchiMate derived from the Netherlands) or if there is truly significant reasons to have the buzz.

It looks like there are two primary drivers behind all the buzz:

• Open Group has now adopted
• Customer & Tooling Vendor up take

 

What is ArchiMate?

If you are not familiar with ArchiMate, it is open architecture modeling standard. It focuses on the visualization of viewpoints and notations on models. It was a result of a 4 million Euro Dutch Government project to create a unifying architecture modeling standard. The standard conforms to the traditional BAIT model (Business, Application, Information, Technology) for representing architecture descriptions.

There are some unique details to the ArchiMate standard which include how they implement behaviors. You can see this in the meta-model below:

There is a notion of the Structure and the Behavior aspects of an architecture. There is a clear separation in the ArchiMate implementation.

Another thing I like about ArchiMate is that it focuses on a core problem rather than trying to solve many problems in a not so great way. This of course is architecture modeling. The models are at a higher level of abstraction than design or development models. Do you see limited or no overlap with standards such as UML and BPMN. There are touch points in these other modeling languages. AchiMate can also be stitched into existing EA frameworks such as TOGAF. There are resources available that describe the touch points between the modeling standard and the EA process framework.

If you are not familiar with ArchiMate I would recommend the following sources to get caught up:

• ArchiMate Quick Reference & Using ArchiMate
• Open Group ArchiMate site
• Sethuraj Nair post "Archimate It's Time had Come"
• Open Group Research Work

 

Vendor Support of ArchiMate

Arguably one of the major deciding factors in a standard is the uptake and productization of the implementation of a standard. Surprisingly, there has been a great deal of recent activity with picking up this modeling standard.

There were a lot of vendors that claimed that they had support for it. These include:

• IDS Sheer
• Bizzdesign Architect 
• Casewise 
• Avolution Abacus (not at the conference)

 

For all the folks using Office tooling there is a solution for you as well. ArchiMate stencils for Microsoft Visio.

 

Open Group and ArchiMate

From what I can tell with talking with some Open Group members here at the conference is that the Open Group has indeed picked up ArchiMate. There is still discussion in the architecture working groups around how this will be positioned, aligned and evangelized by the Open Group.

As you can see from the agenda items for the upcoming Munich event, there is a great deal of planning that still needs to occur.

• ArchiMate Standard Version 1.0
• ArchiMate certification

• 2009 Planning and Discussion
• Formation of workgroups and standing committees
• Coordination status with other groups
• Charter discussion and approval

 

So back to the question, is ArchiMate the next big modeling standard for architecture? It has the potential to be so. As mentioned before, between the Open Group and the tool vendors the standard is coming out strong. It is hard to tell at this point. We really need to see this in the wild to really get a grip on if this is yet another academic standard or something that is adoptable by the masses. 

I think ArchiMate had found a good home at the Open Group. TOGAF does a great job at the process but needs more grounding standards to make TOGAF all that more actionable for enterprises.

Technorati Tags: Modeling,Enterprise Architecture,TOGAF,ArchiMate

Gartner EA Summit - Day 1

So I figured since I already started a thread on the Gartner keynote (Gartner EA Summit - Emergence Enterprise Architecture Keynote) I should finish what I started, huh?

Just so everyone knows, this is Gartner's London EA Summit event and not the North American event. It does seem a lot smaller than the other EA events. I am not sure if it is the case in attendance or just the facilities but it does seem a lot smaller.

I will do a recap of my key thoughts so far on the conference. I hoped around a bit between different tracks based on my interests. Keep in mind I am not going to divulge too much on Gartner's materials here. I'll mostly offer up my opinions on the sessions.

Understanding the Market and selecting an EA Tool

This was the first session I went to after the keynote. I think Robert Handler did a good job of presenting this topic but it is pretty clear that this is for folks that are new to the EA Tools space. For the most part it was very much 101. Keep in mind this isn't a negative comment, just the context.

Even though it was some what beginner in nature there was some fresh and good nuggets in there that are worth pointing out explicitly.

• The notion that there is a trade-off between the Usability (Simple/Clean/"Keep it Simple Stupid") and Functionality (Rocket Scientist, "You want it, we got it")
• EA Tooling Status
• Recommended using Office or what is referred to as the EVP Suite if your organization is at a certain level of maturity (Gartner's Level 1 - 2). This makes a lot of sense and this is the value proposition that we have proposed to organizations with the EATK.

What I did learn in the session was a status on the EA Tool vendors. If you follow my blog you may of seen my simple assessment of this space based on my experience. I talk a lot about the ability to execute, fragmentation of the EA Tooling market and so on. There were very similar themes in the status of tooling. One thing that I didn't factor in was the consolidation of tooling and the impact on existing players. I want name names, but there were some well established names in the presentation that were mentioned as declining due to the impact of consolidation in the market.

One other observation here is that when Robert talked about EA Tools he evaluated them on features. While this has worked in the past, I think we should move toward a capability type of approach when evaluating tooling. I think we will start to realize that what we traditionally thought of a EA capability is really something we already had, such as workflow, security, ECM, repo, etc.

What's Next: Context Delivery Architecture

This was an interesting one for me. When I looked at the title, I think I was expecting something much different. There were some things I liked about this topic such as the notion that this is another Architecture Style. I also, thought there were some interesting nuggets littered throughout.

However, I found there wasn't much meat to the presentation. Maybe it's too early, but I would argue that the Web 2.0 space is all over this and has a ton of great material. Microsoft as an example, is all over this. My colleagues back in Redmond such as Karthik Ravindran, Paul Stubs and Masashi Narumoto (see: Contextual Service, Contextual Service Example, Architecture for Consumer Oriented Services Cont'd) are doing some really cutting edge stuff around this very topic. I really didn't see the holistic pitch around the space mentioning who and what are the key technologies to enable this space. There was a lot of redundancy around Facebook and Nokia. For example these were not mentioned:

• Myspace - Social Networking
• Twitter - Microblogging
• Microsoft - Live Services
• Apple - iPhone and GPS location aware apps and games, music recommendations, etc.
• Zune - music recommendations, subscriptions, social music aspects, etc
• XBox 360 - Gamer Tags, Persona aware, Messenger Integration
• Zooomr - Photo geo-tagging
• Plazer - Location Services with integration into blogs and micro-blog engines
• etc.

There were also a lot of non-qualitative numbers being thrown around. There is probably more data points behind the scenes in research papers but would of really liked to see that information. Information like, where did this data come from that drove these predictions (enterprises, consumer application development, hobbyists, micro-ISVs, SMBs), probability of the prediction and the impacts on current designs and decisions.

I do think that this is going to be part of the future of IT especially as the next generation IT folks join the ranks. It is going to be expected that context services are enabled. The way in which we do things will seem somewhat antiquated to future generations and they will expect these automation services to be available.

Adapting TOGAF Globally

I both had the pleasure of attending Joel Goodling's presentation and also having conversation over dinner as well. He did a great job articulating the value of the using a general purpose EA framework such as TOGAF.

He walked through how he configured TOGAF to fit inside his corporate culture. By being mindful of that terminology and existing organizational structures will play a large role in the success of TOGAF he did some very smart things like renaming the ADM phases. He also removed some of the ADM steps (mitigated that with baking those missing bubbles into other processes).

All in all a great session.

Communicating the Value of EA

I may of become a new fan of Brian Burke. He really hits the nail on the head. There were a ton of tips in this presentation that should really be taken by all architects not just EAs. I would of actually renamed the session to something like "Communication is key to an Architects Success". Needs a little work, but you know where I am going with it...

Even though this is still a bit of 101 as well Brian highlighted some good situational leadership ideas. He reinforced the need for clear communication plans and the notion of communicating frequently even if the message is going to change.

 

Technorati Tags: Enterprise Architecture,Gartner,Context Driven Architecture,EA Tools