Abstract
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.
Journal of Enterprise Architecture