Making Sense of Enterprise Architecture

There has been a lot of discussions on the meaing of Enterprise Architecture, especially recently with enterprise starting to adopt SOA. Following are a few different definitions of Enterprise Architecture, which are basically based on the context of the conversation.

Enterprise Architecture for the Business:
Typically enterprises have strategic objectives such as increasing the revenue by 20% per year, double the revenue in 5 years, increase the number of customers by 50% in 3 years, etc. Once these strategic objectives are established business needs to develop an actionable plan on how it plans to go about achieving this objective which could also be referred to as the "Enterprise Business Architecture".

Enterprise Architecture for IT:
Enterprise Architecture for IT is basically the bluepring, standards, processes, etc. to enable enterprises in achiving their stated business objectives.

The Enterprise Architecture Team:
This is the team responsible for working closely with key business and IT personnel to ensure alignment. This team consists of domain (business) architects who understand the business and are able to translate this for the IT, Technology Architecture who have domain expertise in a particular technology such as Portal, EAI, Mainframe, etc. and finally the Project Architects who are assigned to IT project to be the trusted advisor of the Project Manager, provide technical leadership to the IT project as well as ensure that each of the IT projects do not deviate from the Enterprise standards.

I agree and understand that these are very brief discussions and more of this shall be published soon by the Enterprise Architecture of the Future working group of the SOA Consortium.

A brief history on the creation of SOA Consortium

For those interested following is a brief history on creation of the SOA Consortium

Jan 2005 - BEA launches the effort to establish a SOA Community to focus on accelerate the adoption of SOA, led by Jeff Pendleton, VP Marketing and actively supported by Yogish Pai, the then CTO-IT at BEA.

March 2005 - Intel agrees to joins BEA Systems as a catalyst in establish the SOA Community with both companies taking this message to their respective customer base.

Aug 2005 - First face to face meeting held at BEA Office at Burglington MA attended by a mix of IT Executives, Sr. IT Leadership and Enterprise Architects from 15+ large enterprises. The concensus was that this would have two tracks - one tragetted towards business and other for IT. As all the participants were from IT a concensus was reached that this small team shall start working immediately on some core assets / templates to demonstrate value of such a community. Integration Consortium was also present at this meeting and joined in this effort.

Aug 2005 - Feb 2006
SOA Practitioners work on documenting the best practices referring it as the SOA Blueprint consisting of the following section.

Starting with SOA
SOA Life cycle, SOA Maturity Model

SOA Reference Architecture
The proposed target-state architecture (done to fill in the then current gap in the market) SOA Consortium does not plan to continue working on this, but rather differ this to other bodies like the SOA Working group of The Open Group

SOA Framework
SOA Methodology similar to EA Frameworks

Governance and Organization
Was a gap them - shall now differ this to other bodies like the open group. However, SOA Consortium is currently working on the "Enterprise Architecture of the Future".

Service Lifecycle
Managing the service lifecycle from inception to repurposing or retiring of the service Appendix Commin Vocabulary, Stake holders, etc.

May 2006 - The first version of the SOA Blueprint was publised at the Global Integration Summit at Boston which generated interest from IBM and OMG. Both organziations showed interest in supporting establishing the SOA Community.

September 2006 - In order to eliminate the confusiton of the term SOA Blueprint, especially as OASIS had a TC on this topic, renamed the documents to SOA Practitioners Guide. In addition, the team also included the section on Service Lifecyle and was published to coincide with the BEA Open World at San Francisco

January 2007 - BEA Systems, Cisco, IBM and SAP AG agree to sponsor the SOA Consortium which would be managed by the OMG. The interim leadership team for the SOA Consortium are as follows with elections for this positions to be held in June:

Ashok Kumar, Co-Chair
Avis/Budget, IT Director - Service Architecture

Yogish Pai, Co-Chair
BEA Systems, Inc., Sr. Director, Technology

Richard Soley, Executive Director
Chairman and CEO, OMG

Fill Bowen, Co-Chair Strategy 1
IBM

Amit Sinha, Co-Chair Straety 2
SAP AG

Surkah Durvasula, Chair - Strategy 2
VP Enterprise Architecture, Kohl's

Webcast - "SOA: Top 5 Insights from IT Executives"

The SOA Consortium plans to Present Top 5 Insights Learned from Executive Summits Free Webcast to review results of SOA Executive Summit focus group meetings held with FORTUNE 1000 business executives.

In an open webcast on Tuesday, March 20, 2007 at 2:00 p.m. EDT, Richard Mark Soley, Ph.D., executive director of the SOA Consortium, and Brenda Michelson, principal of Elemental Links, will share “The Top 5 Insights” from the Summits. All are welcome to participate in this live webcast with Q&A session.

The open webcast shall be available at http://www.soa-consortium.org/webcast.htm

Enterprise Architecture: Current State survey

One of the working group from the Community of Practice of the SOA Consortium is working on the Enterprise Architecture of the Future - identifying the roles, skills, framework, governance, etc. impacting the Archtiecture team due to SOA. The team is currently in the process of understanding the current state and had developed a survey to capture this information. This will take anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes to complete and the SOA Consortium does plan to publish the findings soon.

SOA Consortium F2F meeting later this monrht

The first SOA Consortium face to face meeting shall be held on March 28th and 29th at La Jolla, CA and registrations are now open.