Saturday, June 16, 2012

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.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

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:

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.