System for Decision Making to Save USA

Triggered by the fact of current inefficient gridlock meetings in federal government, which caused negative results to our country, I’m thinking about the critical help that government really need: a smart system to help the leadership functioning appropriately and to make better decisions.

Enterprise Mobile Strategies and Solutions

In post PC era, we live in a world with great mobility facilitated by smart phones, tablets, laptop, etc. with wireless connections. We are living in a big Cyber Human Social System now, thanks to Internet. The impacts from this ecosystem to our lives are tremendous, across both of our work life and personal life; actually the line is merging between the two.

Some of my thoughts regarding to enterprise mobile strategies and solutions are summarized as the following:

Enterprise Architecture for the United State of America

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is an enterprise blueprint with descriptions of enterprise vision, structure, and operation models.

To have a long-term plan, a blueprint, and a roadmap for a country is as important as we need one for an enterprise. A country is like an enterprise entity in a bigger scale, which also needs a common vision, cohesive top-down guidance, and effective governance structure and process to make sure the vision, goals, and objectives can be achieved and the execution is heading to the right direction. Therefore, a country also needs an “EA”. This could be an ingredient of socialism, if yes be it. As I discussed in a previous blog article “The Road of Moderation”, the correct choice is usually in the middle between extremes. For a social system, it should be between extreme capitalism and extreme socialism. The most effective and efficient way is likely the convergence from the two. This is about the balance of the top-down guidance, planning, governance, and coordination with the freedom of organic growth from bottom-up.  We can see that USA and China are converging from different directions to an optimized model that suites each. I’m looking forward to the development, and maintain optimistic for the motion. 

Cloud Computing Model and SOA

Recently, someone asked me that “where is cloud computing not SOA?”. It surprised me first, and then I realized people may have different ideas about what is SOA.

Most people may tend to attach SOA to Enterprise Service Broker (ESB) associated solutions, or the technical mechanisms associated with following definition, with or without ESB, which is

Big Data, Knowledge Management, and Enterprise Architecture

Internet provides us explosive information these days and still growing. Internet helps us collect and distribute information conveniently and still getting better. However, information has to be organized and be comprehended to become knowledge. In addition to the usual information that enterprise has internally, such as the information in the enterprise content management systems, databases and data warehouse, enterprise architecture, etc., public Internet content also provide information sources for knowledge extraction serving the enterprise, such as wikipedia, blogs, social network, social media, etc. We need a cohesive approach for knowledge management, to support both decision making and innovation inspiration.

My Summer Trip to China

Just came back from another China trip. Although the sign of ecomonic slow down dose show in many areas, the modern new infrastructure construction continues. The advancement of new technologies, especially in multi-media telecommunication sector impressed me as well. The efforts for Smart City development is underway.

Here are a few pictures from my trip:

The New Generation IT Operating Model

– The Service Oriented IT Operating Model

Martha Heller at Heller Search Associates brought my attention to the discussion on The New IT Operating Model, which is mostly associated with the current trend of Service Orientation. It is a good topic to discuss, especially in a more comprehensive manner for its practical reason. Also, during current economic downturn, this effort can get folks prepared for the upcoming leap. Mark Settle, CIO of BMC Software presented a Broker/Integrate/Orchestrate model at Forbes online, and Richard Barton of PA Consulting presented a Service-Based IT Operating Model at @CIOPortfolio with emphasis on Service Portfolio. These are good stimulation to the discussion, and both articles contributed as a part of the story for the Service-Oriented IT Operating Model.

My take is: A Service-Oriented IT Operating Model should be based on a Service-Oriented Enterprise IT Architecture, more precisely, it should be part of the architecture. We know that models are what architecture creates, which include static models for the descriptions of components, structures and relationships; and dynamic models for the descriptions of operations and processes, where the dynamic models are built and operated on top of the static models. This new IT operating model is part of the "new paradigm" or "paradigm shift" in IT that we are talking about these days.

Enterprise Architecture vs. Collection of Architectures in Enterprise - Presentation Summary

My presentation went well yesterday. Quite a few audience expressed interest afterwards, and some asked for a paper. I guess I can share some key points made in the presentation here. The full presentation can be found at: http://www.architechllc.com/4122.html

Architecture Concept

 

·        Original definition of Architecture by Sir Henry Watton: “In architecture as in all other operative arts, the end must direct the operation. The end is to build well. Well building has three conditions: Commodity, Firmness and Delight”

·        This definition is applicable to EA as well: EA is an operative art, the EA products must direct the effective enterprise operation

• Commodity: EA should serve all its relevant audience and stakeholders, should be consistent and understandable by them (e.g. via multiple views)
• Firmness: EA products should be solid and practicable enough for implementation
• Delight: EA has to be well appreciated and accepted to be adopted and be effective in implementation

Enterprise Architecture and SOA

1.0.      Introduction

SOA is an architectural style that emphasizes well-defined, loosely coupled, coarse-grained, business-centric, reusable and shared services, as well as associated infrastructure. The relationship between enterprise architecture (EA) and SOA has been a hot topic. While there is no question that these two topics are related, the question is how. Some writers and conference presenters have suggested that SOA is replacing EA, but that is not the case. What is true is that SOA brings new agility to EA practice, helps EA realize broader acceptance, and makes EA more usable. Conversely, EA provides SOA practice with enterprise views. The combination of the two can benefit both EA development and SOA practice.

2.0.      Current Enterprise Architecture Practice

The purpose of enterprise architecture is to provide a blueprint and long-term guidance for the enterprise in terms of structure and operation for its business and IT. It can help in facilitating decision making and supports enterprise modernization efforts. It can enhance collaboration and interoperation across an enterprise and can promote enterprise efficiency and effectiveness by streamlining business process and technology implementations. It enables resource sharing and increases cost efficiencies by identifying common and sharable components and services.

The challenges to current enterprise architecture practice can be organized into four categories:

             1.      Stakeholder participation
             2.      Architecture modeling
             3.      Architecture usage
             4.      Architecture maintenance and program management.

 We will discuss each category in the following sections. We will address, as well, how SOA can enable effective EA practice.

The Road of Moderation

In preparing my presentation on “Enterprise Architecture vs. Collection of Architectures in Enterprise”, I tend to think the relationship of the two is about the balance of the top-down guidance, planning, governance, and coordination with the freedom of organic growth from bottom-up. This also makes me think about the recent financial chaos in the world, which leads to the discussion of the effectiveness and performance in socialist system .vs. capitalist system, where the socialism emphasizes the centralized top down guidance, governance and coordination, while the capitalism emphasizes the organic growth with freedom for individual. After the melting down of the typical socialist system, represented by Soviet Union, by late 90s, now we see the typical capitalist system, represented by United State, is getting into fundamental problems as well.

The Open Group Conference in D.C

This is the first time The Open Group will host a conference in Washington D.C (July 16-20), which is convenient to me. The conference and my presentation info follow:

https://www3.opengroup.org/events/timetable/967

Enterprise Architecture vs. Collection of Architectures in Enterprise

 

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is becoming popular in most private enterprises these days due to the practical needs in this era of IT, after its noticeable fading in public sectors. At this stage, the lessons learned from public sectors could be very helpful to the EA adoption in both public and private sectors in moving forward.

We noticed that there is still no unified answer regarding to what is EA and what should be in it. It is not rare to see that so called “EA” is to use an EA tool and/or an EA repository to collect all type of “architecture” artifacts inside enterprise. These “architecture” artifacts are developed in different timeframes, cover different level of content details, and are created from different perspectives for different purpose. While a real EA should consist of “architecture” artifacts in concert by planning ahead with a designated purpose for each view. The level of details is good enough to convey intent and to serve the purpose, no more and no less.

Training: Shared Service and Cloud Computing Best Practice, Governance, and Lifecycle Management

Day One: Shared Service and Cloud Best Practice with Business and IT Alignment ICE
Build a foundation for Shared Service and Cloud Computing understanding, and provide a practical guidance with comprehensive content coverage and case studies to address the popular issues and confusions during practice.

Day Two: Shared Service Governance and Lifecycle Management

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

More details can be found at: http://architechllc.com/4122.html

Inter-Enterprise Architecture for Shared Service, Cloud, and Interoperability

With Internet business model grows beyond enterprise boundaries, such as service outsourcing, public cloud, and interoperation of business partnerships, the architectures for these extended enterprises seem necessary. My recent discussion with folks working with The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and on the Federal Health Architecture (FHA) reveals such real needs for the Inter-Enterprise Architecture, which I’ve introduced earlier in this blog and in the San Diego Open Group Conference 2011. I hope more efforts will happen in this arena. The ArchiTech Group LLC is definitely well positioned for such service. A short paper can be found here:  http://architechllc.com/4122.html

A Different Perspective for Information and Data Management

Information and data management is getting more challenging these days, with the velocity of data we are producing and the tendency of increased data production. However, I think the key for the solution is beyond information and data management. It is about how and what data should be collected.

I still remembered the raw data collection from web sites for data preservation. The amount of data growing makes me wonder even we can store them, how we can catch up in processing them to make them meaningful, e.g. to transform the data into information, let alone transform information into useful knowledge. If data processing speeds continue lag behind data collection speeds, the data collected will not be useful, but add burden to the slow process. If more meaningless data involved, it’ll add more burden to the process. Therefore, we need to improve the data collection process, to collect the data with purpose, e.g. a Service Oriented Data Collection and Management Process, and collect the data cleanly.