Inter-Enterprise Architecture Paper

Inter-Enterprise Architecture paper:
http://www.architechllc.com/uploads/Publications/jea_march2016_zhao.pdf

Foundation-Based Approach for Digital Business Transformation

Big changes are going on towards digital enterprise and business. Businesses and governments are adopting shared services and cloud computing, which implies a paradigm shift in how digital transformation and IT can impact business opportunities, performance, processes, and organization dynamics.  Businesses increasingly rely upon IT to achieve its goals and to implement its strategies. With technologies and products of many generations, and with stove-piped implementations, current IT complexity is growing faster than ever in replying to the required changes, integrations, and transformations. IT costs are increasing exponentially.  Enterprise architecture, SOA, and Cloud Computing are aimed at meeting these challenges. We proposed a Foundation-Based Approach with an Enterprise Foundation Framework© to provide a cohesive practice in EA, SOA, and Cloud Computing. This solution is essential in providing a disciplined manner to achieve the modernization and evolution objectives for digital and IT enables businesses.

For instance, it would be helpful to have an Enterprise Architecture in place during cloud computing adoption and digital transformation. While cloud computing may be over stated with its indirect influences during the hype, it is a practical implementation mechanism for Service Oriented Infrastructure, which is a subset for Service Oriented Architecture adoption.  Business advantages are gained mainly via shared services in many different ways.

About Digital Eco-System

Talking about eco-system, our universe is an inter-connected and harmonic natural eco-system. It’s well designed by nature or superpower, while it’s up to human to find the natural laws. The digital eco-system is one step forward in human efforts to be connected in digital manners. Our work and life are emerging into a universally connected digital eco-system. The increasing networking in digital manner and boundary-less data flow are the new trendy characters in forming. The dynamic nature of such digital eco-system is revolutionizing our current autonomic social structure, culture, and environment. Some noticeable phenomenons include:

Correlation and Unity
Digital eco-system brings the correlation and unity to this world. We are an Internet connected one world now. Any local event can cause much broader influence, and also any local optimization may not be good enough to achieve desired results due to the complex connections and influence from the outside world. We have to understand the big picture and relationships of the involved components. This is what “architecture” and “landscaping” supposed to do, and have to do it in extended scales and scopes, with including components in all forms: material, digital, and human; and with identification of relationships, establishment of connections, and suitability of context.

New Characters in Digital Age
Our current social structure, culture, and environment are pretty much formed to suit the industrial age, while digital age requires differences in many ways:

• Social Structure: changing from autonomic groups to widely connected social communities on Internet.
• Organizational structure: changing from vertical to horizontal and flattened
• Culture: changing from territory focused to collaboration
• Communication channels: extending from traditional face-to-face to new media with digital multi-channel connections and social networking. We are seeing people talking to their smart devices and computers more frequently than human
• Communication style: moving from out spoken in person to writing, composing, and publishing in digital media and on Internet
• Leadership and management style: moving from command-control to motivation and inspiration focused, due to the increasing mobility of the work force
• Competition landscape: moving to suit more constructive and “win-win” approaches, due to the complex inter-connections we are experiencing that beyond human recognition. The biggest enemy for us will be the limitation in understanding the complexities brought by the digital connections in this unified world, which is far beyond the challenges from business competitors.

The Man-Machine Relationships
During this evolution, we need to re-think about our relationships with digital systems and mechanical elements. We need to ensure that the purpose of our design is to benefit human being with digital assistance, instead of being hijacked by them or having to compete with them. We need to think about what to automate, where need human intelligence, how human work and live with the digital components and smart mechanical objects introduced by IoT (Internet of Things), We need to explore how to best use human’s potential, and the meaning of an enjoyable life for human.

Also, it is necessary and important to explore how business should be architected to overcome the challenges and to take advantage from this in forming digital eco-system environment. This is becoming essential for new age business conduct, to keep business agile, and to take advantages from collaboration across organization boundaries.

Note: I have presented the content in this article as a panelist in the recent Open Group conference:
http://events.opengroup.org/events/the-open-group-baltimore-2015/speakers-c552ab4d26ff4eaea2bb465aea5e0755.aspx

IT as a Service

In order to provide effective and efficient IT support and reduce complexity and cost, IT is evolving to provide commodity services that enable the separation of business functions from common shareable IT services. As identified in the Federal Line of Business Initiatives, IT management is becoming one of the Line of Businesses (LoBs). The growth of cloud computing is helping IT business to achieve its commodity service goal. The term of “X as a Service” is becoming popular accordingly as well. Therefore, the term of “IT as a Service” is unavoidably coming up for discussion.

In general, we can consider IT with three major components: information processing (e.g. with software applications), IT infrastructure, and IT management and operation. The IT as a Service (ITaaS) is to apply the shared service concept to the three components respectively. For the shared services in information processing, we have the concept of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Software as a Service (SaaS) in cloud computing arena; For the shared services in IT infrastructure, we have the concept of Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in cloud computing arena; For the shared services in IT management and operation, we have talked about a new generation IT operating model (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20140920161406-7206455-the-new-generation-it-operating-model), i.e. a service oriented IT operating model, which can work together with ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library).

The role of SOA: SOA is an architectural style and modeling approach that emphasizes well-defined, loosely coupled, reusable and shareable services. SOA concept can be well adopted in both software applications (e.g. for information processing) and IT infrastructure, as well as in IT business services. The core of SOA architecture style consists of three components: 1) Service Provider: who publish services to Service Registry; 2) Service Consumer: who find services from Service Registry and use them; 3) Service Registry: where contains information for available services.

The role of Cloud Computing: Cloud Computing enables a practical implementation mechanism for SOA concept, with software as a service, platform as a service, and infrastructure as a service running on cloud. However, ITaaS has a larger scope than cloud computing.

The role of the new generation IT operating model and ITIL: The New Generation IT Operating Model is mostly associated with the current trend of service orientation. The“Plan/Build/Run” is a typical and simple IT operating model, which is still valid if we apply lifecycle with it, and have service orientation content being imbedded into all its operating stages. The lifecycle presented in ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) can be considered as its extension from IT service management prospective. ITIL has five stages instead of three: Service Strategy (plan), Service Design (build), Service Transition, Service Operation (run), Continual Service Improvement. ITIL can be an integral part that fits into the Plan/Build/Run model, with focus on IT service portfolio management and IT service management lifecycle.

In conclusion, the concept of ITaaS is to apply service orientation to its three components respectively, to enable IT being operated as commodity service and as a line of business by itself.

Big Data, All Data, or Just Data

 Big data is a hot topic these days, and it is extended to “All Data” recently. Actually, we are dealing with data from multi-sources, multi-channels, and multi-media; and the data can be from real-time business operation, data warehouse, back-office business data (e.g. financial, CRM, HR), social media, etc. The accumulated data amounts are enormous, although each individual data source can be big or small. The data correlations from different sources are as important as the analysis of “big data”. Therefore, we cannot ignore the importance of data management and processing.

 

Information and data management is getting more and more challenged due to the velocity and volume of data generation, as well as the tendency of increased data production. An important step for information and data management could be how and what data should be collected. The speedy growing of data could make people wonder even we can store them (e.g. using the new technologies like Hadoop), how we can catch up in processing them to make them really meaningful during analysis, e.g. to transform the data into meaningful information, and transform information into useful knowledge. Therefore, we need to improve the data collection mechanisms, e.g. to have cleaner data and better data organization mechanisms, with data/information correlation indicators. More meaningless data involved more burdens to the process. If data processing speeds continue lag behind data collection speeds, the data collected will not be as useful as expected, but add burden to the slow process. Yes, this is the new challenge in dealing with data, regardless big data or all data.

This is also published on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140528003636-7206455-big-data-all-data-or-just-data?trk=prof-post