2010

The increasing complexity of enterprise information systems makes it very difficult to prevent local failures from causing ripple effects with serious repercussions to other systems. This article proposes the use of Enterprise Architecture models coupled with Bayesian Belief Networks to facilitate Failure Impact Analysis. By extending the Enterprise Architecture models with the Bayesian Belief Networks we are able to show not only the architectural components and their interconnections but also the causal influence the availabilities of the architectural elements have on each other. Furthermore, by using the Diagnosis algorithm implemented in the Bayesian Belief Network tool GeNIe, we are able to use the network as a Decision Support System and rank architectural components with their respect to criticality for the functioning of a business process. An example featuring a car rental agency demonstrates the approach.

A senior information technology leader with over three decades of military, government, and industry experience believes that much of our traditional, professional information technology thinking lags contemporary challenges. Information-on-demand and the social networking phenomena create new office worker expectations regarding universal information access and mobility. Yet, many information technology managers remain mired in “network think” and labelled by their organizations as the “office of no.” The author challenges contemporary security and enterprise architecture thinking to go beyond network borders and look for solutions in a “trusted cloud” to address the information needs of users, customers, and partners.

An ontology-driven enterprise architecture framework is presented that provides substantial benefits over conventional representations of traditional architecture domains such as business, data, application, and systems. These benefits range from the tractable synthesis of large and complex domains, improved architecture maintainability and evolution, and more effective analyses of architecture improvement scenarios. An enhanced architecture meta-model is presented, followed by an ontology framework that emphasizes composition via sub-ontologies and normalization. Tools and techniques for ontology persistence, development, testing, reasoning, querying, and visualization that constitute the solution landscape are also discussed. Finally, a set of recommendations provides guidance on selecting the right mix of technologies and tools to compose and interpret enterprise solutions.

Enterprise Architecture is a complex and daunting discipline that touches multiple aspects of an enterprise as well as people participating in various roles throughout the life cycle of the enterprise. The Zachman FrameworkTM for Enterprise Architecture offers a formal and highly structured representation of an enterprise. The Framework’s “Perspectives” correspond to specific stakeholder groups that play different roles in the implementation of an Enterprise Architecture. This article demonstrates that the influence that the Zachman Framework’s Perspectives (rows) have on each other can be used to derive a rational allocation of stakeholders’ skills and time that promotes specifications cohesion throughout the implementation of an Enterprise Architecture. We do so by prescribing upper bounds to stakeholders’ relative degree of involvement based on the level of influence that they exert at any given point in time on Enterprise Architecture artifacts mapped to the Zachman Framework.