Volume 6

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Are You Solving Today’s Problems With Yesterday’s Thinking?

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.

Ontology Driven Enterprise Architecture Framework

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.

A Model for Characterizing the Influence of the Zachman Framework’s Enterprise Architecture Perspectives

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.

Enterprise Architecture Evaluation Methods

The purpose of this case study is to outline and analyze the types of Enterprise Architecture (EA) assessment methodologies available to the United States Federal Government. This will consist of defining “assessment,” describing the two primary EA assessment methodologies that exist within the Federal Government to date, and analyzing the purpose and benefits of these assessment methodologies. These assessment methodologies are the Government Accountability Office (GAO) Enterprise Architecture Management Maturity Framework (EAMMF) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) EA Assessment Framework. The GAO EAMMF is a more complex methodology based on the number of and relationship among the framework components. The scoring is based on identifying the maturity level of an organization’s EA program according to a scale of 1-5, including half-stages. The purpose of the EAMMF is benchmarking and comparing EA program evolution within an organization. Overall, the EAMMF is good to use when an EA is still in development to ensure the appropriate foundation and building blocks exist. In contrast, the OMB EAAF is a more straightforward framework with a more complex scoring algorithm that requires a score interpretation matrix. Overall, the EAAF framework is good to use for organizations that have established EA programs that are seeking improvement in the results from their Enterprise Architectures. Finally, this paper will conclude with a detailed example of applying the EAAF evaluation methodology to a specific agency. This example illustrated how meticulous and exacting performing an Enterprise Architecture assessment can be, but it also shared the benefits and type of information that an organization will learn from doing so. Hopefully the case study will provide readers with a better understanding of the available assessment methodologies in the public sector and which type would provide the feedback and assessment results suitable for their organization.

Tactical Enterprise Architecture: Challenges to Building a Strategic Program

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is widely accepted as a strategic practice, focused on building a definition of future state and then managing a business and technology roadmap to help get there. The young EA program however, is often expected to contribute immediate benefits to the organization before an enterprise strategic vision or the long term roadmap has been defined. While engaged in building the solid foundations of an EA program, the Chief Architect will need to be sensitive to two distinctly different management expectations. The EA program must first be visionary, leading their management teams towards an integrated and enterprise view of business, information and technology architecture. Second, the program must also be flexible enough to manage tactical issues thrust upon them, and find ways to work those solutions into the longer term end-state architecture.