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06/22/2006 Entry: "Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit: Day 2"

Today was an interesting day. While reading mail and RSS feeds this morning I saw that a Microsofter did a much better job blogging about the first day of the conference than I did. So I commented that "One of the true revelations of being an enterprise architect is in the books that Microsoft was giving away. One on enterprise patterns, one of PowerPoint. I do a lot of PowerPoint! :)" Harry wrote me back... and then put my quote at the beginning of his presentation. Nice. See, the social network does work.

Then I bumped into the technology director of BlueCube who's labor management solution we looked at a few years ago. We spent a lot of time together talking about architecture and how to deploy their app into our environment, which would have been a challenge, but a good one. See, the social network does work.

As I was leaving for the day, someone said I looked like John McEnroe. See, the social network does not work.

So day two of the conference was good. Lots of SOA. Lots of Web 2.0 chatter. Lots of good material about communications, review, and the process of both. If I can stop looking at the boats in the marina, I'll get my notes typed up and posted.

We also saw a really good US Navy ship go through San Diego bay, but since I'm not a trainspotter I don't know what type of boat it was. The number on it was 45 but that's not helping my searches.

Notes are posted in the entry page.

Where is the architecture in SOA
An Enterprise Architecture Contains Multiple Viewpoints; Each Viewpoint Contains Multiple Levels of Abstraction; Each Level Contains Multiple Types of Artifacts
Stop thinking about integration and think about interoperability through standards
SOA is Modular software, client-decoupled, services, loose coupling, designed to be useful and usable by other applications, useful and usable by other enterprises, centrally managed repository and managed run-time middleware
Architectures must support events (businesses run on events)
Web 2.0: Community (User collaboration) , Business (web services business model) and Technology & Architecture (RSS, REST, AJAX, etc.)
Plan for how it will grow over time, not for today
Governing an managing is an architect’s day to day job
Be ready for registry federation
Don’t need to have an ESB to have an event driven ESB, but it can help make things easier

Architecture review processFulfill business strategy with architecture (trace back choices to business strategy)
Guidance by tier: enterprise wide, group wide, LOB wide
Best practices
Define Project Thresholds for Required Architectural Review
Consider Planned Risk Exposure and Architectural Options
Review Each Project at Three Points in the Early Life Cycle
Establish Architectural Governance Capability
Review Each Qualified Project
Encouraging high compliance
Via Communication and Participation
Via Keeping Architecture Current
Via Enabling Exceptions
Via Self-Certification

Beyond SOA
Consider user experience in SOA; architecture is incomplete without user’s perspective
Requirements and use cases do not describe the problem
Web 2.0 /social software changes how we think about the system
Software automates tasks, internet automates users
Focus on Time To Value, not just Return on Investment

Infrastructure patterns and services
Single EA process: Define future state (Requirements, Principles, Models), Document current environment, Develop gap analysis, Derive migration plans
Applications are part of a solution
Reduce complexity (i.e. Oracle on AIX only)
Create guidance on whether or not to share infrastructure
APIs should be a separate sub-domain
Attributes to document: Name, Owner, Description, Use case, Scalability, Pricing, Maturity, Examples, Principles, Component and service manifest (by domain)

EA Communication
Objective: definition, scope, choice, benefit
Content: Future information and technology direction, principles for building new capabilities, dissemination and compliance review
Governance council is part of communications (help with EA decisions and oversight of EA)