Mike Walker's Blog

Microsoft’s Certified Architect (MCA) replaced by IASA’s CITA-P Certification

IASA’s CITA-P Certification Named by Microsoft to Replace the Microsoft Certified Architect
Austin, TX, (PRWEB) May 3, 2010 -- In a conference call and email announcement on Wednesday April, 28, Microsoft Learning announced that it would discontinue offering the Infrastructure and Solutions architect certifications, and would fund the migration to the Certified IT Architect Professional (CITA-P) offered by the International Association of Software Architects (IASA).

IASA has created a grandfathering process to allow easy adoption of the CITA-P certification for current Microsoft Certified Architects holding the Solutions or Infrastructure specialization. As MCA’s have already gone through a rigorous interview process similar to the CITA-P Board review, the grandfathering process focuses on mapping skills and experience to the IASA skills taxonomy.

Andy Ruth, the Vice President of Education for IASA, launched the MCA Infrastructure and the MCA Solutions credential in 2004 while with Microsoft Learning. According to Microsoft, the credentials were launched to help establish the IT Architect profession at a time when the IT industry needed thought leadership and architectural taxonomy.

Ruth believes the profession should be self managed by the practitioners in the form of a professional association, as in other industries--medical, legal, etc. “The certification of a profession needs to be run by the profession, not from within a vendor with a specific product or technology. Microsoft releasing the certification to IASA is recognition of that.”

“IASA is not trying to sell a product or specific technology, so individuals and organizations can be confident there are no ulterior motives in their certification and education programs,” said Paul Preiss begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting, CEO of IASA. “IASA’s mission is to support architects on their career path, and ensure they have the skills and knowledge necessary to deliver on the core value proposition of the profession: to make and save their employer money through the use of information technology (IT).”

Darren Day, Microsoft Certification Business Manager, who hosted the call for Microsoft said that IASA has "developed large and supportive communities dedicated to the IT Architect profession.” He continued, “They are technology agnostic, respected in the industry, and offer trusted IT architectural programs and credentials for the breadth architect.”

Read the entire release at: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/05/prweb3946754.htm or go towww.iasahome.org to find out more.

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

Making Sense of Architecture Standards

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Yesterday I attended the Architecture track at the Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) Summit. The format was quite different than other forums. The architect forums was based on a collaborative approach where three is no agenda or themes and it is up to the participants to create it. It was very effective and thought I would share my thoughts with the rest of you.

So I facilitated two sessions on Enterprise Architecture. The first asking the question, what is EA? And the second, what are the important standards in the EA space?

The goal of the second session wasn't necessarily trying to get at what are the standards but rather what are the more prevalent and most impactful.

After a bit of white-boarding with the group and dialog we quickly derived to a way to classify the standards that we have been talking about.

The image above show the segments or classification of these standards. By asking basic questions such as How, What, When, Who and Why we can also simplify this a bit. Starting from the bottom up lets talk about what was discussed and I'll add some of my thoughts as well.

Taxonomy and Ontology

Every system has an architecture. In fact, a system could have many architectures. In IEEE 1471, an architecture is a conception of a system. There may be many conceptions of a system.

What this provides to the enterprise architect, solutions architect or domain architect is a way to have a constant set of terms for describing what it is they are building. This should be at the core to your architecture activities. Downstream benefits include further reuse of architectures, design patterns, architecture modeling and traciablity of systems to business capabilities.

The beauty of all this is that this taxonomy is flexible. Meaning that System, Mission, Environment and Architecture, are all conceptual in nature. There are no requirements ("shalls") in the standard pertaining to these entities. The requirements in the standard apply to the items below which pertain to the concrete representation of an architecture.

For more information on IEEE 1471 go to their web site at: http://www.iso-architecture.org/ieee-1471/index.html

 

Information Model and Decision Support

The Zachman Framework was brought up many times during the conversation but in various forms. We ended up classifying Zachman as decision support. The reason for this was that Zachman and other derivatives of Zachman focus more on:

• What are the right questions
• How do I organize those questions
• What do those answers mean

The Zachman Framework excels at these activities. However where things start to break down is how to orchestrate those questions. Meaning what is the process in which I get the information, consume it, process it and ultimately make it actionable.

The ideal goal here would be to use the Zachman Framework in conjunction with the Process Capabilities coupled with a defined Architecture Taxonomy.

For more information visit the Zachman Framework  web site at: http://www.zachmaninternational.com/2/Zachman_Framework.asp

 

Process Framework

As mentioned above when talking about decision support, there is a need for a process to wrap how we make our decisions. This gives Enterprise Architects the ability to have repeatability in their processes.

Below you will see the TOGAF Architecture Development Method (ADM) "crop circle" which outlines the process framework.

ADM provides a framework which can support man other standards and frameworks. It is technology agnostic and is more focused on how architecture processes should be orchestrated. This allows organizations to:

• Preserve existing organizational structures (if desired)
• Use homegrown processes and existing frameworks and standards

Having this higher level process framework is essential to architects. Thee are a series of benefits for the organization:

• Constancy in how solutions are created
• The right people are selected for the right job
• Proper metrics can be obtained to gauge health of the EA process
• Predictability of results which lends to being able to apply some level of risk management to decisions

Actors

Out of all the topics, this was discussed the most. There is a great deal of ambiguity in the industry around what are the required skill sets of an architect. There are some bodies that help with that task.

• OpenGroup ITAC Program - This is for the practitioner. When you have many years of experience and you want to be accepted in the industry as a credible architect.
• IASA - For the aspiring architects that is largely academically focused. This program provides a program for those that have little architecture experience and want to get into architecture.

Both have a role and are valid in their own ways. However, each one of these has a specific niche.

Manage

This topic is indirectly related but still very relevant. This aspect covers PMO based processes, service management and IT Governance aspects. In the service management area specifically we are seeing closer alignment with EA. The latest version of ITIL has alignment with EA practices.

See my previous blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewalker/archive/2007/07/06/itil-moving-towards-enterprise-architecture.aspx

 

 

Putting it all Together

Thankfully there have been other like minded individuals folks at OpenGroup and alike that have thought about this problem. Below are some overlays and descriptions of putting these pieces together.

TOGAF + Zachman

Read this article for more information:

http://www.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf8-doc/arch/chap39.html

 

TOGAF + IEEE 1471

TOGAF adoption of IEEE 1471 happened in 2000 with TOGAF version 6.0. There is a great article that gives an impact assessment on this and the benefits of using 1471 with TOGAF.

http://www.enterprise-architecture.info/Images/Documents/IEEE-1471-togaf-impact.pdf

 

Other Important Standards & Frameworks

It's important to not that there are a lot of standards out there. We haven't scratched the surface on all the various specifications and standards for EA. Below you will find other standards that you may be interested in as well.

Other EA Frameworks

• DODAF
• TEAF
• FEAF
• CADM
• MODAF

 

Tags: Enterprise Architecture

Insurance Messaging Framework Available

Last year I mentioned we had an Insurance Messaging Framework that focused specifically on the integration issues in insurance. Well we finally have released the bits to the public on CodePlex. In this early release of the reference framework it that allows you to dynamically create ACORD based messages to integrate into your .Net projects.

A big thank you goes out to Colin Cole from our US based insurance group who had created this framework. Colin will be showing this off at the Financial Services Developer Conference next week in NYC.

The framework provides a unique architectural approach to accomplishing this business need by abstracting the complexity. While this approach is appealing and have been attempted, they usually fails because people don’t know where to start, due the size of it’s scope, mistake prone and mistakes are expensive, usually involves a lot of foundational work that are not directly related to meeting the business needs (e.g.: using ACORD to design systems), etc. The uniqueness of our approach is we enable jump starting and organic evolution towards alignment by providing a rich set of assets/artifacts that align with industry models (e.g.: alignment to Motion insurance model) and semantic definitions (ACORD standards). We can abstract the many different policy administration system into a set of service that we can consistently use for business process composition.

Below is just a fraction of what is delivered in the framework:

 

To sweeten the pot, we have even included SDK-like help files that will allow you to navigate the framework with ease.

 

For more details look on the CodePlex and MSDN Architecture Center sites.

• http://www.codeplex.com/imf 
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/FinServArch

OpenXML is getting Closer, and we should all be Excited about It!

With the latest changes to the specification it is bringing the standard close and closer to the finish line. This is a great thing not only for Microsoft but for the community. To have one standard that allows us to represent information in our word / calculation processors (i.e., Word and Excel).

Brain Jones gives a full update on where we are with the standard on his recent post.

I think that it is very important for us to consider the value of this. Like it or not we have Word and Excel tightly integrated into our business processes. Often times our business users demand these tools so they remain productive.

The proprietary artifact formats that these tools leave behind have given architects challenging obstacles. This is particularly true in the realms of integration. Now if we have an XML standard that defines the information, it makes the data all that much more interoperable with our business processes. 

Architects should consider how OpenXML will impact their IT Systems and think through some of the new opportunities that can arise with this new format.

Architecture Modeling - IEEE 1471 has been adopted by ISO

ISO has published ISO/IEC 42010:2007, Systems and software engineering — Recommended practice for architectural description of software-intensive systems. The text of this ISO standard is identical to IEEE 1471:2000, and will serve as basis for the joint ISO and IEEE revision.

The joint revision has several goals:

• to widen the scope of application from software-intensive systems to general systems architecture (including enterprise architecture);
• to harmonize with the ISO systems engineering (ISO 15288) and software engineering (ISO 12207) life cycle processes; and
• to align terms and concepts with other ISO architecture efforts, including RM-ODP (ISO 10746) and GERAM (ISO 15704).

As shown below there are many views to architectures. Many times architects want to create the one ultimate view. This is just unrealistic. The 1471 standard provides a taxonomy to represent these architecture views.

 

At the present time, frameworks are aligning to 1471. TOGAF embraces but does not strictly adhere to ANSI/IEEE Std 1471-2000 terminology. From the horses mouth:

In TOGAF we endeavor to strike a balance between promoting the concepts and terminology of ANSI/IEEE Std 1471-2000 - ensuring that our usage of terms defined by ANSI/IEEE Std 1471-2000 is consistent with the standard - and retaining other commonly accepted terminology that is familiar to the majority of the TOGAF readership.

Additionally, this can also fit into a mapping of views to the schema of the well-known Zachman Framework.

For more information go to the IEEE 147 site.

IEEE 1471 site

FAQ

 

Tags: Enterprise Architecture ADM TOGAF Zachman Standards

Microsoft is a member of LIXI

Microsoft is now a member of the Australian Lending standards body called LIXI.

http://www.idm.net.au/story.asp?id=8709

New Insurance Solutions Framework

There is a bit of movement here at Microsoft in the Financial Services space. In the insurance industry we just released the Insurance Value Chain.  Before that launch I was working on interoperability scenarios with the ACORD standard and what that looks like in the WS-* world.

Now I'm happy to let you know we have more solutions for insurance companies out there. Based on the OBA RAP for Loan Origination concepts we have developed a set of solutions for the New Business Origination processes. The banking loan origination processes are very similar to the insurance new business processes, from an architecture perspective it makes sense to address this space with a similar architecture.

As shown above the Insurance Solution Framework (ISF) is built in a similar fashion as the OR-LOS solution providing the entire architecture picture. This architecture also fits in nicely with the Insurance Value Chain if you would like to plug in Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) applications within the architecture.

The ISF supports the following Lines of Business (LOB):

• Life and Annuities
• Property and Casualty
• Life Care

The ISF abstracts the complexity of the underlying/backend systems, the unique OBA architectural approach and the framework enable businesses, overtime, to move from an application centric paradigm to a business process centric paradigm. Because the services, activities and process templates are built on ACORD a wide/broad range of backend systems can be surrounded/encapsulated to simplify the “topology” of applications. In cases where there are gaps in/between backend systems, the framework also provides a good design for building full-featured service.

This approach provides a viable alternative to rip-and-replace strategy typically required (due to additional capabilities required in backend systems like BAM, workflow, etc) to move to a business process centric paradigm. It leverages existing systems thus greatly reducing the risk associated core system replacement.

Not only is the architecture fully defined but it is also well documented. Implemented in a similar style as many of our SDK's ISF provides an enormous amount of definition around the architecture as well.

As all of you know the insurance business process is extremely complex and varies depending on which insurance carrier your at. The ISF is more of a solution accelerator or a reference architecture rather than a line of business solution. Keep that in mind we you investigate these solutions.

If you would like more information on the Insurance Solutions Framework contact Microsoft Consulting Services. I will work with MCS to possibly write some whitepapers that will give you more guidance into our thoughts in the insurance space.

LOS Reference Architecture and Commercial Lending

Colin Cole shows us how Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) has extended the OBA RAP for Loan Origination Systems (OR-LOS) Lending Framework.

Video: Loan Origination Commercial Extension

 

Big thanks to Colin and his team for their leadership in extending the lending solutions for Microsoft.

TD Bank Financial Group Rolls Out ATM's With IFX

I was happy to see that TD had adopted the IFX standard. It further solidifies the need for industry standards. They have become the first financial institution globally to operate the Interactive Financial eXchange (IFX) specification, an emerging standard for open and interoperable online financial services and data interchange.

TD Bank has replaced more than 2,500 ATM's, or automated banking machines (ABMs), with machines based on the standard. I am interested to see how this plays into other systems that leverage the ATM messaging such as ATM Cash Management or Monitoring.

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