2009

This article provides a basic foundation for developing a Service-Oriented Enterprise Architecture (SOEA) through a conceptual data architecture design. SOEA uses services (i.e. business, software and technology) and data to describe the composition of strategy, business, data and information technology. SOEA has to identify the business services and data needed to support the strategy and business processes of the enterprise, and map the business services and data to software and technology services (i.e. IT infrastructure services). This type of architectural framework supports heterogeneity, interoperability, and extensibility which serve as the basics for continued enterprise growth and effectiveness. The article also addresses the architectural constructs required to support the business goals and informational needs across an enterprise by principally addressing the service and data architecture layers providing the blueprint for the architectural design.

The Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) Method for Federated Enterprise Architectures (EA) comprises an integrated set of techniques for enterprise analysis, contextual visualization, decision support, and portfolio management. The method utilizes state-of- the-art SOA concepts and artifacts to produce federated community architecture designs supporting mission and business transformations. The resulting architectures are not exclusive to the SOA paradigm and can be engineered and implemented using a variety of techniques such as functional decomposition, component oriented, SOA, or COTS- centric methods. The SOA EA method produces and applies advanced artifacts and tools including Enterprise Component Maps (ECM), heat maps, business intelligence dashboards, and EA line-of-sight models for decision support and portfolio management. The authors tailored the method from a precursor SOA method that was heavily exercised in practice. Tailoring extended and applied the EA metamodel to support decisions such as IT consolidation, information sharing, programmatics, and portfolio management. The method integrates with federated system lifecycles in consideration of downstream uses of the artifacts produced. Intended for application to community-level architectures, the method is lightweight, extensible, agile, and can produce actionable architectures. We also present some sample artifacts from a security EA case study.

Metaphor “sign inferences establish that there is a relationship between two factors, so that one can be predicted from knowledge of the other. This relationship is called correlation”. While metaphor states one is the other, has characteristics of the other and informs one of the other their likeness is not apparent, is seemingly unrelated and yet has an essence common to both. The parallels between effective and literary reasoning reveal the technical and conceptual metaphor’s science. Using both literary and architectural cases the metaphor explains the two realities they diversely express and therefore we learn how the metaphor works when it is a sign which correlates and not a form which causes. This article cites only one of the nineteen scientists from A. Ortony’s, Metaphor and thought honing in on the work of George Lakoff, an American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.