Issue 3

Making the business case for enterprise architecture (EA); or a systematic approach to the alignment information technologies with business functions seems like “chip shot” in today’s cost-conscious business world. IT departments around the globe are continually seeking ways to reduce sky-rocketing maintenance costs and to eliminate redundant legacy information systems. The business-side of the house is continually pressing for bigger, better and faster technological capabilities in order to sift through and capitalize on the vast amounts of data that has been compiled. When a project comes along that addresses these concerns, one would assume that it would be “slam dunk” for selection by the firm’s governance board. Conceptually speaking, EA makes complete business sense as it has the potential to revolutionize how IT is conducted around the world; similar to how Toyota’s Total Quality Management system revolutionized how manufacturing operations are performed. But what about the return-on-investment, total cost of ownership, and discounted cash flows? Can an enterprise architecture program pass the rigorous financial tests of the reluctant-to-spent corporate bureaucrats? More importantly, can enterprise architecture survive the politics of a mature organization that is already set in their ways? This article applies the same analytical approaches that one would use in the selection of a new application or hardware to see how well EA holds up to the test. This work also addresses some of the key areas of contention that may arise when an organization begins to debate why they may or may not require an enterprise architecture program at their firm. Finally, several best practices are highlighted which identify the hallmarks of a well-implemented EA program.

In the past few years there has been a major leap in the size of data that exist on the Web. Especially the launch of Web 2.0 websites like Wikipedia.org or YouTube.com had its effect on the presented information complexity as well as its actuality. There has been also a steady rise of B2B transactions enabled by the exchange of data between companies. The actual acceptance of e-commerce applications increased the amount of transactions in the B2C segment as well. As these changes already affected the structures of today’s Enterprise Architectures (EAs), future architectural concepts in this context will have to pick up challenges which are caused by the dynamic availability of a huge amount of services as variable elements of a next generation of enterprise software systems and system landscape. The article focuses on the problem of the dynamic discovery and invocation of appropriate Web Services in EA environments to fulfill this purpose. The proposed model is based on a decentralized network of Web Service providers and uses software agents which are responsible for the intelligent discovery and management of Web Service-Endpoints suitable to the needs of the consuming entity. The model considers preferences of users as dynamic criteria. Furthermore the reputation of service providers is seen as collective knowledge of a user community whereas past experiences of neighbored users influence the autonomous acting of user agents. Thus, relevant Web Services will be semantically described and discovered in a collaborative manner. The proposed architectural model is based on an open network architecture which abandons central elements for the management of service offerings in order to increase the openness of conventional architecture approaches. This article shows what current SWS technology offers in respect to the requirements needed by future EA scenarios and will point out the potentials of current SWS technologies in the EAI and B2B context. Furthermore SWS frameworks will be investigated according to their potential as regards to a dynamic discovery and invocation in the given context.