Mike The Architect

EA Practitioners Have Significant Influence on $1.1 Trillion in Enterprise IT Spend

Gartner just released a report entitled, "EA Practitioners Have Significant Influence on $1.1 Trillion in Enterprise IT Spend” that strongly links to their Business Outcome Driven Enterprise Architecture.  This is interesting article because it’s shows the latest thinking from real EA practitioners with some real good stats on where we are at from an industry perspective. 

What is also clear is that EA is now positioned to do what we have wanted to do for years, drive business results not just technology decisions. This is a big opportunity for us and it is now our opportunity to lose.

 

EA Practitioners Have Significant Influence on $1.1 Trillion in Enterprise IT Spend

Fifty percent of enterprise architecture (EA) practitioners have a significant impact on enterprise IT budget activities and decisions, according to a recent survey by Gartner, Inc. A July 2012 Gartner survey of EA practitioners found that half of EA practitioners have an influence over their organization's IT budget allocation that is either "final decision maker" or "great deal of influence."

Based on the EA survey results from Gartner events in North America and Europe, analysts estimate that EA practitioners have a "final decision-making" influence on $331 billion in worldwide enterprise IT spend and a "great deal of influence" on $774 billion in worldwide enterprise IT spending. Overall, EA practitioners have an influence that is either "final decision maker" or "great deal of influence" on $1.1 trillion in worldwide enterprise IT spending.

"Overwhelmingly we find EA practitioners focused on delivering on business value and strategic transformation," said Philip Allega, managing vice president at Gartner. "Gone are the days of just 'doing EA' with little value or impact. Sixty-eight percent of organizations surveyed stated that they are focusing their EA program on aligning business and IT strategies, delivering strategic business and IT value, or enabling major business transformation."

Gartner is leading the way in defining and mastering a radical new approach to EA, which is business outcome-driven EA. Leading EA practitioners are focused on creating diagnostic deliverables to help business and IT leaders respond to business and technology disruptions.

"This new generation of EA practitioners offers technology and service providers (TSPs) with an opportunity as well as a threat," said Mr. Allega. "Technology and service providers should develop targeted marketing to this new generation of EA practitioner as they have a significant influence on their organization buying decisions. Those that fail to understand the priorities, strategic focus and impact of EA practitioners will jeopardize their ability to sell into an organization."

Gartner has identified the impact of EA trends on IT purchasing decisions, and has the following advice and recommendations to help TSPs target this audience more effectively:

In organizations supporting EA as strategic, and as collaborative between business leaders and IT, TSPs will increasingly find EA practitioners influencing IT spend.

EA practitioners have a high degree of influence over emerging technology purchases, with 52 percent of the EA practitioners surveyed reporting directly to a CIO or CTO. They are also "very involved" in integration consulting services (64 percent) and business applications (52 percent). As EA practitioners continue to focus on integrating and aligning with business priorities and actively working with business leaders, their degree of influence on business intelligence tools, workplace tools and business applications will likely increase as well.

Organizations starting, restarting or renewing their EA efforts present an opportunity for providers to market to and influence a new generation of EA practitioners.

The survey revealed that 77 percent of respondents were either restarting or renewing EA efforts (18 percent), initiating EA for the first time (34 percent) or taking EA efforts to the next level (25 percent). In organizations starting EA for the first time, EA practitioners have a significant influence on IT budget decisions, but significantly less have decision-making authority. These new and restarting organizations present an opportunity for TSPs to target a new generation of EA practitioners.

As organizations become more mature in supporting EA, they will have a greater degree of influence on IT budget allocations to products and services.

Many organizations begin their EA journey by focusing inside the IT organization on system consolidation, standardization and cost management. As they mature, this evolves into looking more closely at the "alignment" between the business strategy and IT strategy. From here the EA program evolves further to become "business outcome-oriented," such that in a mature EA program, other areas of decision making are guided and influenced by business outcome-driven EA.

 

More Information

Additional information is available in the Gartner report, "EA Practitioners Have Significant Influence on $1.1 Trillion in Enterprise IT Spend”. The report is available on Gartner's website at http://www.gartner.com/resId=2286216.

Gartner on New Skills Required For Enterprise Architects

I haven’t seen this video in awhile but I was refreshed with it in the Elevating Enterprise Architecture course and thought I would share with all of you.

The predictions from Gartner were in my opinion,  absolutely spot on. I believe we are seeing those predictions validated in the market continuously as time goes on.

Below is a video that walks through the Gartner view on the new skills EA’s must have in this ever evolving EA industry.

Some of the key messages that I extract out of this are:

• EA organizations must conduct them selves as a service provider with quantifiable value, metrics/KPIs, SLAs and predictable and repeatable results.
• The role of the enterprise architect has shifted from a purely technical guru
• Value identification and creation is critical
• The way in which an EA conducts his/her job has to shift from the “know it all IT person” to the collaborative, inclusive, empathic and professional style of doing business

Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2013

Late last month Gartner published their annual Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2013. Based on the view that Gartner paints it looks to me as a evelotuionary year ahead rather than revelotionary. This is no way is a bad thing. It shows what revolutionary concepts from last year have made it and are continuing to be invested in.

Gartner analysis can be summerized into three core statements / trends:

• It's clear that there is a shift of where computing happens, from your desk to your palm and fingers anywhere in the world (1) (2) (5)
• Information is real-time, always on and universally connected (3) (7) (8)
• Cloud architectures are the de facto standard for enterprises going forward (4) (6) (9) (10)

 

The top 10 strategic technology trends for 2013 include:

1. Mobile Device Battles
2. Mobile Applications and HTML 5
3. Personal Cloud
4. Enterprise App Stores
5. The Internet of Things
6. Hybrid IT and Cloud
7. Strategic Big Data
8. Actionable Analytics
9. In Memory Computing
10. Integrated Ecosystems

 

Mobile Device Battles

Gartner predicts that by 2013 mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide and that by 2015 over 80 percent of the handsets sold in mature markets will be smartphones. However, only 20 percent of those handsets are likely to be Windows phones. By 2015 media tablet shipments will reach around 50 percent of laptop shipments and Windows 8 will likely be in third place behind Google’s Android and Apple iOS operating systems. Windows 8 is Microsoft’s big bet and Windows 8 platform styles should be evaluated to get a better idea of how they might perform in real-world environments as well as how users will respond. Consumerization will mean enterprises won't be able to force users to give up their iPads or prevent the use of Windows 8 to the extent consumers adopt consumer targeted Windows 8 devices. Enterprises will need to support a greater variety of form factors reducing the ability to standardize PC and tablet hardware. The implications for IT is that the era of PC dominance with Windows as the single platform will be replaced with a post-PC era where Windows is just one of a variety of environments IT will need to support.

Mobile Applications and HTML5

The market for tools to create consumer and enterprise facing apps is complex with well over 100 potential tools vendors. Currently, Gartner separates mobile development tools into several categories. For the next few years, no single tool will be optimal for all types of mobile application so expect to employ several. Six mobile architectures – native, special, hybrid, HTML 5, Message and No Client will remain popular. However, there will be a long term shift away from native apps to Web apps as HTML5 becomes more capable. Nevertheless, native apps won't disappear, and will always offer the best user experiences and most sophisticated features. Developers will also need to develop new design skills to deliver touch-optimized mobile applications that operate across a range of devices in a coordinated fashion.

Personal Cloud

The personal cloud will gradually replace the PC as the location where individuals keep their personal content, access their services and personal preferences and center their digital lives. It will be the glue that connects the web of devices they choose to use during different aspects of their daily lives. The personal cloud will entail the unique collection of services, Web destinations and connectivity that will become the home of their computing and communication activities. Users will see it as a portable, always-available place where they go for all their digital needs. In this world no one platform, form factor, technology or vendor will dominate and managed diversity and mobile device management will be an imperative. The personal cloud shifts the focus from the client device to cloud-based services delivered across devices.

Enterprise App Stores

Enterprises face a complex app store future as some vendors will limit their stores to specific devices and types of apps forcing the enterprise to deal with multiple stores, multiple payment processes and multiple sets of licensing terms. By 2014, Gartner believes that many organizations will deliver mobile applications to workers through private application stores. With enterprise app stores the role of IT shifts from that of a centralized planner to a market manager providing governance and brokerage services to users and potentially an ecosystem to support apptrepreneurs.

The Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept that describes how the Internet will expand as physical items such as consumer devices and physical assets are connected to the Internet. Key elements of the IoT which are being embedded in a variety of mobile devices include embedded sensors, image recognition technologies and NFC payment. As a result, mobile no longer refers only to use of cellular handsets or tablets. Cellular technology is being embedded in many new types of devices including pharmaceutical containers and automobiles. Smartphones and other intelligent devices don't just use the cellular network, they communicate via NFC, Bluetooth, LE and Wi-Fi to a wide range of devices and peripherals, such as wristwatch displays, healthcare sensors, smart posters, and home entertainment systems. The IoT will enable a wide range of new applications and services while raising many new challenges.

Hybrid IT and Cloud Computing

As staffs have been asked to do more with less, IT departments must play multiple roles in coordinating IT-related activities, and cloud computing is now pushing that change to another level. A recently conducted Gartner IT services survey revealed that the internal cloud services brokerage (CSB) role is emerging as IT organizations realize that they have a responsibility to help improve the provisioning and consumption of inherently distributed, heterogeneous and often complex cloud services for their internal users and external business partners. The internal CSB role represents a means for the IT organization to retain and build influence inside its organization and to become a value center in the face of challenging new requirements relative to increasing adoption of cloud as an approach to IT consumption.

Strategic Big Data

Big Data is moving from a focus on individual projects to an influence on enterprises’ strategic information architecture. Dealing with data volume, variety, velocity and complexity is forcing changes to many traditional approaches. This realization is leading organizations to abandon the concept of a single enterprise data warehouse containing all information needed for decisions. Instead they are moving towards multiple systems, including content management, data warehouses, data marts and specialized file systems tied together with data services and metadata, which will become the "logical" enterprise data warehouse.

Actionable Analytics

Analytics is increasingly delivered to users at the point of action and in context. With the improvement of performance and costs, IT leaders can afford to perform analytics and simulation for every action taken in the business. The mobile client linked to cloud-based analytic engines and big data repositories potentially enables use of optimization and simulation everywhere and every time. This new step provides simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action.

In Memory Computing

In memory computing (IMC) can also provide transformational opportunities. The execution of certain-types of hours-long batch processes can be squeezed into minutes or even seconds allowing these processes to be provided in the form of real-time or near real-time services that can be delivered to internal or external users in the form of cloud services. Millions of events can be scanned in a matter of a few tens of millisecond to detect correlations and patterns pointing at emerging opportunities and threats "as things happen." The possibility of concurrently running transactional and analytical applications against the same dataset opens unexplored possibilities for business innovation. Numerous vendors will deliver in-memory-based solutions over the next two years driving this approach into mainstream use.

Integrated Ecosystems

The market is undergoing a shift to more integrated systems and ecosystems and away from loosely coupled heterogeneous approaches. Driving this trend is the user desire for lower cost, simplicity, and more assured security. Driving the trend for vendors the ability to have more control of the solution stack and obtain greater margin in the sale as well as offer a complete solution stack in a controlled environment, but without the need to provide any actual hardware. The trend is manifested in three levels. Appliances combine hardware and software and software and services are packaged to address and infrastructure or application workload. Cloud-based marketplaces and brokerages facilitate purchase, consumption and/or use of capabilities from multiple vendors and may provide a foundation for ISV development and application runtime. In the mobile world, vendors including Apple, Google and Microsoft drive varying degrees of control across and end-to-end ecosystem extending the client through the apps.

 

 

Gartner Enterprise Architecture Tools Magic Quadrant 2012

Gartner has released yet another great resource for Enterprise Architects with their EA Tools Magic Quadrant.

The full report can be found here: http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1CVXD3X&ct=121119&utm_content=c26292b9-8692-4afe-9fec-28e9315d6a34

 

For those that have already selected an EA tool and are looking to find out how your vendor is fairing in the overall landscape, Gartner states it well in their What's New section with what changes have occurred over the last year from the last study:

Overall, it's been a "light" year as far as the degree of change in this marketplace is concerned. During the past year, some EA tool vendors have begun, or continue, to further reposition their products as broader enterprise business planning tools, in addition to being classical EA tools. This drives two primary vendor changes: in product marketing and in product output targeted at effective presentation to business leaders. This repositioning is helping vendors increase the interest and engagement of business leaders, and overcome skepticism about the term "enterprise architecture." These vendors report that they are working to expand their addressable market and increase revenue.
For users, this strengthens vendor viability by expanding their business in this otherwise smaller, niche market. At the same time, it drives improvement in features that are important for use by business stakeholders. Although these vendors still support EA concepts, principles and best practices, this repositioning may help to rebrand IT-centric architecture efforts in a more business-relevant manner.
Of course, renaming and repositioning EA will not resolve challenges of governance, business strategy, measurement, collaboration and communications. Clients need to evaluate a vendor based on its real abilities and capabilities to support their holistic EA tool needs — not based purely on market repositioning.

Gartner Webinar: Best and Worst Enterprise & Application Architecture Practices

Best and Worst Enterprise & Application Architecture Practices

Presented by: Betsy Burton & Michael Blechar

EDT: 10:00 a.m. & 1:00 p.m. | PDT: 10:00 a.m. | GMT: 14:00 & 17:00

Those who have cracked the code on enterprise and application architecture today have programs that are performing well and delivering recognized value to the business. Others are recovering from costly mistakes. This presentation describes best practices of the high-performing teams and lessons learned by others.

Please join VP and Distinguished Analysts Betsy Burton and Michael Blechar as they discuss the best practices of enterprise and application architecture in today's economy.

In this webinar, you will learn:

• What are the best practices of enterprise and application architecture?
• What benefits do organizations see when they consistently apply these best practices?
• How can you avoid the pitfalls?

After registering you will receive a confirmation email with a calendar invite and instructions on how to join the webinar.

View all upcoming webinars gartner.com/webinars.

Questions? gartnerwebinars@gartner.com

Enterprise Architecture Tool Assessments

It’s been a busy couple months for the analysts. Both Forrester and Gartner have built out and refreshed their latest Enterprise Architecture Tool Assessments for 2011.

After reading both of them, they actually complement each other. The Gartner analysis reads more like deep research and analysis but the Forrester report is able to bubble the findings up in an easy way. My personal style is to look at the Forrester report first, to determine what vendors I do and don’t want to look at, then go to the Gartner report for the in depth analysis of that vendor.

See below for an example of the style of analysis:

 

Both of these are great reports just different styles and approaches to the outcomes.

So if you are in the market for a new EA Tool or just want to educate yourself on the tools out there and their capabilities take a look at both of these reports. I think you will find value in both.

EA Tools Assessments

• The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Architecture Management Suites, Q2 2011.
• Gartner Assessment of Enterprise Architecture Tool Capabilities

 

Technorati Tags: Enterprise Architecture Tools,Enteprise Architecture,Forrester,Gartner

Best Practices in Enterprise and Applications Architecture

For those interested in a free webcast from Gartner on EA best practices here are the details:

Hosted by: Betsy Burton (VP Distinguished Analyst) and Daniel Sholler (Research VP)

Those who have cracked the code on enterprise and application architecture today have programs that are performing well and delivering recognized value to the business. Others are recovering from costly mistakes. This presentation describes best practices of the high-performing teams and lessons learned by others.

Please join VP and Distinguished Analyst Betsy Burton and Research VP Daniel Sholler as they discuss the best practices of enterprise and application architecture in today's economy.

 

What You Will Learn

• What are the best practices of enterprise and application architecture?
• What benefits do organizations see when they consistently apply these best practices?
• How can you avoid the pitfalls?

Direct Event Link

http://my.gartner.com/portal/server.pt?open=512&objID=202&mode=2&PageID=5553&ref=webinar-rss&resId=1503420&nicam=SocMedia&nichn=Twitter&niseg=webinar122810

 

Technorati Tags: Enterprise Architecture,Gartner,Best Practices,Guidance,EA

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