Enterprise Architecture Knowledge Digest

CBDI Forum is the Everware-CBDI research capability and portal providing independent guidance on best practice in Service Oriented Architecture and engineering. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is widely forecast to be the most profound transformation in the history of business and IT and many large enterprises and governments are now planning adoption. Undertaken correctly Service Oriented Architecture enables the highest level of convergence between business and IT, in which information solutions reflect the real requirements of the business for efficiency, standardization and adaptability. Well executed SOA will deliver radical reductions in cost and help businesses to improve their business design for growth and flexibility. However, today most enterprises and government agencies are experimenting with SOA in a tactical manner that will not scale. CBDI Forum believe it is essential for business success that structured architecture and engineering approaches are employed to ensure appropriate policy development, execution and governance.

Stephan de Haas: In a nutshell, SAP's SOA Middleware and Application Infrastructure is promising. SAP has a very advanced business process platform providing Enterprise Services upon which clients can leverage the benefits of SOA to create the 20% of innovative processes, also integrating non-SAP applications, to increase their market share. Furthermore, SAP's process platform and its approach to co-innovation is positive, inceasing the opportunity for customers to source further innovative processes from ISVs that deliver on SAP's platform. The integrated portfolio minimizes complexities and help to run the remaining 80% of standard processes most efficiently. Last but not least, SAP offers a evolutionary migration path to Enterprise SOA for customers.

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is touted by many as the key to code reuse, which, practically speaking, is easier said than done, according to experts. The idea is that you get cost reductions with code reuse, but even enthusiasts agree that it won't happen without careful planning. The topic was a popular one at the Open Group's Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, held in San Francisco at the end of January. At the event, Srikanth Inaganti, a lead consultant with Wipro Technologies, spoke in a session on building a reuse framework for SOA. He has spent the last two and a half years at a client site, working on promoting reuse across divisions. So he speaks from the trenches. And he's part of the Wipro team that's developing SOA frameworks and consulting toolkits. In this presentation, Inaganti discussed the importance of reuse in the context of SOA transformation, issues involved in promoting a reuse culture inside the enterprise and what he modestly referred to as "tentative solutions."

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DODAF-FEAF Work Product Mapping Guide

Yogish Pai: One of the best practices for Enterprise Architecture teams to redo the enterprise road map on a periodic basis. It is typically reviewed and updated during the yearly budgeting cycle and my preference is to perform this activity every 18 months. The best practices (and the traditional approach) is to first document the as-is, next develop the target or future state (architecture) and finally develop a short term (6 months), mid term (12 months) and long term (18 months) road map. Preferable an actionable road map that ties back to the business initiatives.

Some say the benefits of reuse are exaggerated. Prove them wrong by implementing a plan of action. Service oriented architecture (SOA) is often touted as the key to code reuse, which experts say is easier said than done. The idea is that you benefit from cost reductions with code reuse, but even enthusiasts agree that it won't happen without careful planning. The topic was popular at the Open Group's Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, held in San Francisco at the end of January.

Anthony, Stephen K. The Serials Librarian, 55(01-02), pp. 235 - 253. As they seek new roles in the digital realm, libraries are finding it increasingly difficult to manage the complexity of technology implementation while continuing to cost-effectively meet their mandates as information providers. Many organizations find themselves dealing with legacy, isolated, duplicated and ineffective information systems. The practices of enterprise architecture and service oriented architecture hold much promise as methodologies to reduce complexity, to encourage and enable collaborations, and finally to rein in the beast of technology. Even libraries under budgetary constraints can benefit from knowledge of enterprise architecture and service oriented architecture best practices.

Most enterprise IT operations rely heavily on batch processing operations. The reliance doesn't go away when you move to a service-oriented architecture (SOA), yet SOA just means online transaction processing to many people. Sridhar Sudarsan has met this problem head on. As an executive IT architect with IBM's Software Lab Services, he has led enterprise architecture solutions for several customers worldwide, including major enterprises in the finance, public sector and automobile industries. For Sudarsan's clients, batch processing remains a big question mark as clients migrate toward SOAs.

Service Oriented Architecture usually implies heavyweight technology for large enterprises. The advantages of the SOA architectural pattern also apply to smaller environments. To follow SOA principles, you don't necessarily need all the overhead that is useful in larger environments. You can use lightweight principles like REST to do so. This article describes how.

The number of companies investing in service-oriented architecture (SOA) has doubled over the past year in every part of the world, with a typical annual spend of nearly $1.4 million, according to a new research report from the analyst firm AMR Research that surveyed 405 companies in the U.S., Germany and China.

Matthew Heusser, July 31, 2008: How to test service-oriented architectures is no idle question. A failure in a SOA system at Heathrow Airport's $8.6 Billion Terminal 5 caused 1.6 British Pounds (about 3.2 million U.S. dollars) of losses in one week. The error? Simply that a filter put in to ensure that the baggage handler was tested in isolation was never removed - so event messages were never passed on to other, dependent systems.

Draft 2.0 of The Open Group's SOA ontology. This draft is being exposed for comment outside The Open Group prior to formal Open Group company review. Interested parties are invited to sent comments, and those comments will be addressed in the version submitted to formal review by The Open Group. A PDF file contains the textual description of the ontology, and an OWL file contains the ontology itself.

Author Geoffrey Moore explains how SOAs will become the underlying force of the new data center.