“Being Measurable” as an Architecture Principle

Performance-driven and being measurable are becoming current trend for business planning and operations. We have seen more enterprises aiming at performance-based, goal-driven and result-oriented continuous organization improvement. Enterprise Architecture is an integral effort in this direction. Therefore, being measurable is naturally considered as an architecture principle. It requires architects to think about the possible performance measures regarding to the architecture components they are working on.

Background

The popularity of enterprise architecture started from Federal Government via legislation mandate, and then grows into private sectors.  The crucial historical event in Federal Enterprise Architecture [1] was the passing of the Information Technology Management Reform Act (now called the Clinger-Cohen Act) [3] in 1996. This act mandated architecture best practices for government agencies. It pointed the Chief Information Officers (CIO) in federal departments and agencies being responsible. A CIO Council was established to encourage collaboration across agencies.

The President's Management Agenda [5] (PMA, FY 2002) recognizes the significance of information management as a core mission of government, and thus gave an impetus to the development of the Federal Enterprise Architecture.

Leadership .vs. Management

After experienced several big programs/initiatives in big enterprises, it makes me think about what’s their most critical success factor. The answer is the “Leadership”. Quite often, the management role is confused with leadership, and coordination is confused with guidance.

There are management positions in each organization or program/initiative. However, this doesn’t mean there is a leadership. I’ve seen quite often that new organizations or new programs/initiatives are put in place with people and management structure, and then it is expected right things to happen. It doesn’t unfortunately. It doesn’t work without clear vision, plan, understanding the subject matters, identifying the roles and responsibilities. We can compare this with starting a play in a theater: we collected all the actors, and organized them for scenes, but we don’t have a manuscript, the director doesn’t really have the play story figured out and designed for scenes, and he expects the actors to create by themselves, the actors don’t have a clear picture about the whole story, so don't really have unified or consistent ideas on how to play their roles in the context. When the curtain opened, and the real show started. What can you expect?

A leader is the play director who should have a manuscript in hand and have the whole story in mind. He should know the subject matters of the “show” and can provide guidance to the “actors”, not only “manage”.

Enterprise Architecture for Real

Got a chance to revamp a big EA program recently, a good opportunity to do things right. It seems most EA programs were started with “mechanical” components and processes, while lacking of real “meat” or expertise to develop the architectural content. Many “architects” involved in EA don’t really know what “architecture” means, how the architecture can be effectively described, or had experience to accomplish a working architecture. There are not many opportunities for such kind of training neither in school nor at work. All TOGAF, DoDAF, and Zachman Framework have suggested some best practice references, however, you have to know how to abstract and describe architecture at the 1^st place, as a fundamental skill.

I’m starting from architecture guidelines and reference architectures across EA sub-domains to enable an effective, disciplined, and cohesive architecture description mechanism across organizations. The governance practice will be consolidated after. Guidance before governance, like legislation before judiciary.

Will see how it goes.

SOA as a Real Case in China

Just came back from China. I have visited several cities that have newly developed “high-tech gardens” in them, e.g. Shanghai, Su Zhou, Wuxi, Changshu, Luoyang … … Those high-tech gardens are quite modern, usually built in a new part of a city combined with a city development plan for the new areas. There is a combination of working and living areas in these new developments, where I saw the real good cases for SOA, i.e. service sharing and resource sharing, especially in infrastructure establishment. The concept of Inter-Enterprise Architecture (IEA) does apply as well, though they have executed partially without knowing what IEA is.

Also, it demonstrated that the strong government position make such service sharing happen, which established a governance body above each individual enterprises or companies.

Is this a good reference?

SOA Best Practice, Governance, and Lifecycle Management

Just finalized the content for the training next week:

Day One: SOA Best Practice with Business and IT AlignmentBEST PRACTICE

Build a foundation for SOA practice understanding and provide a practical guidance with comprehensive content coverage and case studies to address the popular issues and confusions during SOA practice.

SOA Concept and Benefit Review: SOA CONCEPT AND BENEFIT REVIEW

·        SOA Conceptual Model

·        What SOA Means

·        SOA Major Benefits and ROI Estimate

·        ROI Estimate 2: SOA VISION AND ALIGNMENT WITH ENTERPRISE

ARCHITECTURE

Alignment of Business and IT

·        SOA Vision Reference

·        SOA Relationship with Enterprise Architecture

·        Service Oriented Enterprise (SOE)

·        Service Oriented Infrastructure

Case Study: "Why business model and cost model are important”

Session 3: SOA PRACTICE MODEL

SOA Practice Model

·        Service Structure: Layered Service Structure

·        Service Oriented Business Architecture: Business as a Service

·        Service Oriented Application Architecture: Composite Applications

·        Service Oriented Data Architecture: Data as a Service

·        Service Oriented Infrastructure: Framework, Cloud Computing, and ITIL

Case Study: "How to create SOA strategy and model for enterprise: Example Reviews and Lessons Learned"

SOA Practice Approach

·        Service Planning for Enterprise View

·        Segmentation and Federation Approaches

·        Service Componentization

·        Iterative and Incremental

Day Two: SOA Governance and Lifecycle Management

Provide a comprehensive coverage in governance concept, model, content, and SOA governance practice references. It’ll demonstrate how service lifecycle can be managed effectively with the help of SOA governance practice. Also, it’ll demonstrate how SOA practice can be evolved towards higher maturity with a roadmap. Finally, we’ll discuss where SOA is heading to.

§  Governance

§  Governance domains

§  Governance model

§  A governance structure

§  SOA Governance

§  SOA governance definition

§  SOA governance model

§  SOA governance structure

§  SOA governance process

§  SOA governance rule and regulations

§  SOA governance guidance

§  SOA governance technologies

§  SOA Lifecycle Management

§  SOA lifecycle components

§  SOA lifecycle management with governance

§  Two Case Studies:

§  Governance practice in two different organizations

§  SOA Maturity Model and Roadmap

§  Enterprise architecture maturity model

§  Service architecture maturity model

§  Service maturity model

§  SOA adoption roadmap

§  Where SOA Is Heading To

§  Curent state and trend

§  Business evolution associated with IT

§  Collaboration environment and cloud computing

§  Enterprise landscape evolution

§  The challenges enterprises are facing

§  How various efforts can work together cohesively

§  Content Summary and Discussion