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Managing Enterprise Culture and Politics

Good engineering solutions are not enough to guarantee success in Enterprise Architecture. One must also understand the culture and politics of enterprises, as well as the shape of the human landscape (as opposed to the technology landscape) in which Enterprise Architecture solutions will be deployed. This article uses the analogy of intelligence gathering to identify and explore the perspectives necessary to decode an enterprise’s culture and politics, and looks at the application of that knowledge to the effective implementation of Enterprise Architecture.

The Profession of Enterprise Architect

This study presents a general review and comparison of the emerging profession of the enterprise architect and the established profession of the traditional architect. This study is intended to establish a context for further research and publication on enterprise architecture as a profession and the applicable lessons from traditional architecture. Additionally, the findings suggest that the profession of the enterprise architect may be an extension of the roles of a traditional architect and the likenesses of each profession are noted.

Interfaces for Enterprise Solutions

This article compares current and future interface concepts and the dramatic cost implications of interfaces. With the increased importance of exchanging information between enterprise solutions, a coordinated interface architecture should be considered. An interface architecture for the extended enterprise requires a shared communication language, one that standards greatly facilitate. While traditional interface approaches, such as point-to-point and hub and spoke, have been widely deployed in the past, they are costly to maintain and do not provide loose-coupling and fast return-on-investment. Web services and the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) are promising interface technologies that provide access to loosely-coupled services using commercial standards and existing infrastructure to support a service oriented architecture. Numerous cost drivers, such as the interface architecture and functional, technical, and organizational characteristics significantly impact the cost of an interface. An understanding of interface technology and cost drivers will ensure system architects are better equipped to design and deploy cost-effective interface architecture.

Simplify the Creation of Enterprise Architecture with Special Expert Teams

The classic development waterfall consists of two sequential stages. There is an ‘architectural synthesis’ stage that creates new architecture, new fundamental structure. This is followed by an ‘engineering design’ stage that develops and optimizes a system to satisfy requirements produced by the first stage. In addition, to having different goals, these two stages employ different tools, different processes, and demand different skills. Synthesis, the creation of new architecture, employs inductive reasoning, insight, and creative problem solving. Synthesis requires holistic solutions consistent with a single unified vision. As a result, the synthesis stage resists partitioning into subtasks. The synthesis of complex architectures stresses the capacity of individual architects and is best executed with Special Expert Teams (SETs). SETs are temporary task-directed teams of experts that benefit from special management tools. SETs have the capacity to conceptualize overarching concepts. This paper presents the concept of SETs for the creation of enterprise architecture.

EA: It’s Not Just for IT Anymore

Enterprise Architecture, widely used in commercial ventures and federal agencies, has been viewed primarily as an IT discipline and has been relegated to the office of the Chief Information Officer or the Chief Technology Officer. In this paper, the authors argue that EA has the potential for far-reaching impact on an organization’s “bottom line.” In many organizations, the EA is the only repository of enterprise-wide abstractions of the business. To begin to realize its potential, the EA needs to be exploited by enterprise management processes and should be organizationally re-located where its influence can be far more pervasive. By positioning the EA as a repository for enterprise management, it can integrate discrete business operations and strategies to enable a more efficient, more agile organization.

Towards Executable Enterprise Models: Ontology and Semantic Web Meet Enterprise Architecture

In this article, we argue that ontology’s and semantic web technologies are important to the future of Enterprise Architecture (EA). The article outlines the value and need for dynamic models of enterprises, and points to semantic web technologies as the most promising way to do this. First, we observe that Enterprise Architecture (EA) models that could be distributed, federated, and executed will be essential to support the needs of agile enterprises to respond rapidly to opportunity and change. As the value propositions, applications and uses of EA move toward executable models, we note that ontology’s and semantic web standard languages are well suited for the next generation of EA solutions. Semantics involve knowledge representation and semantic web technology not only makes it easier to aggregate and analyze information, but also paves the road to active or executable enterprise architectures driven by its capabilities for expressing, querying and federating enterprise models and information.