SOA Consortium Insights

SOA Consortium Practitioner Panels at Gartner's AADI & EA Summits - June 11 & 13

In what's becoming a habit, the SOA Consortium will once again host practitioner panels at Gartner's AADI and EA Summits.  We have two great panels lined up. 

On Wednesday, June 11 at AADI, Todd Biske, Melvin Greer and Mike Kavis will be talking about measuring the value of SOA.  Knowing the panelists, I'm sure the discussion will go beyond 'code reuse'.  The panel will be moderated by Gartner's Daniel Sholler and SOA-C's Richard Soley.

"In this session, several practitioners will share firsthand experience of justifying and measuring the value of their service-oriented architecture (SOA) activities: How to make the initial business case and continuously demonstrate the benefits? What metrics to use? What return on investment (ROI) to expect? What challenges have they encountered, and how did they overcome them?"

On Friday, 13 June at EA, John Williams, Maja Tibbling and Marty Colburn will join Todd to discuss SOA & EA lessons learned from the trenches.  This panel will be moderated by Gartner's Bruce Robertson and SOA-C's Richard Soley.

"In this user panel, co-moderated by Gartner and the SOA Consortium, several enterprise architecture (EA) practitioners will look at the links, synergies and dependencies between service-oriented architecture (SOA) and EA. How does SOA fit into the EA picture? How can it help make EA more valuable? Does SOA need to be part of a broader EA? Hear the first-hand experience and lessons learned from our panelists, and ask them your own SOA/EA questions."

If you are attending the Gartner events, I highly recommend stopping by these sessions for insights from real-world practitioners. 

Enterprise Architecture 2010 Talk-- Where EA Means Business -- at SAP ASUG on May 5, 2008

On Monday, I'll be representing the SOA Consortium's EA2010 working group at SAP's ASUG conference in, you guessed it, sunny Orlando.  I'll be giving a talk on our EA2010 work.  Areas of discussion include 21st century business, service-orientation, business architecture, enterprise architecture and enterprise architects.  If you are attending the show, please come by, Monday at 9:30-10:30, in 308C. 

If you'd like to connect at the show, I'll be at the Sunday evening ESOA Community Networking Session and taking in sessions and wandering around the expo floor on Monday.  Drop me an email at bmichelson at gmail dot com.

Enterprise Architecture 2010: Questions for EA, SOA and Business Architecture Communities

Have you had a chance to check out our new released EA2010 webcast and position deck?  If you did, great.  If not, no worries.  You can still participate in the discussion.  In our work, we call out the importance of business architecture as organizations progress with service-orientating their business and IT operations.  (Yes, SOA as a strategy.  No, SOA as a technology.)

As you can imagine, we had a lot of healthy (and some circular) discussion as we were working on the EA2010 material.  In the end, we decided we would publish the frame, and use it to solicit feedback and insight.

Some of the questions we would love the broader EA, SOA and Business Architecture communities to chime in on are:

1. Do you agree that Business Architecture as an important emerging enterprise architecture discipline?  Does your organization already practice business architecture?  If so, formally or informally?

2. Where will/do business architects come from?  Are these business savvy technologists?  Technology savvy business professionals?  Today's business analysts?  Other?

3. Assuming Enterprise Architecture 2010 encompasses not only today's technology laden "enterprise architecture" but also Business Architecture, where will it report?  Is this still an IT function?  Does it report to a business executive?

Please share your thoughts with us, as a comment on this post, via a trackback from your blog, or drop me an email brenda at soa-consortium dot org.  If you have other thoughts on the EA2010 work, please share those as well.

Enterprise Architecture in 2010 Means Business

One of the working groups in the SOA Consortium’s community of practice is the “EA2010” group. This group of seasoned enterprise architects from industry, government, systems integrators and vendors, has been actively discussing and defining the next generation role of enterprise architecture. Specifically, what enterprise architecture looks like – organization, practices and people – in a business-driven, service-oriented world.

This week, the EA2010 working group published the first release of their view of Enterprise Architecture 2010 in a Powerpoint deck.  Here's a sneak peak:

In preparation for this release, I sat down with the EA2010 working group leaders, Ashok Kumar and Yogish Pai, to discuss their working group’s motivation, findings and next steps. That conversation is available to the public as an on-demand webcast or podcast.

During our conversation, Ashok and Yogish touched on a wide range of enterprise architecture concerns, including catalyzing business change, gaining business-smarts, shifting focus to business architecture, managing enterprise architecture, participating in strategy and delivery, and winning enterprise constituents.

After viewing or listening to the webcast, please share your thoughts with us. As we discuss in the webcast, this is a work-in-progress and we really want to hear from the broader enterprise architecture community.  Leave a comment here or send an email to brenda at soa-consortium dot org.

And yes, the full EA2010 presentation deck is available for download at the webcast location).  Feel free to discuss and use any and all materials in your own enterprise architecture programs.

ACT/IAC Enterprise Architecture SIG Meeting - Member Guest Post from Dr. Burc Oral

Dr. Burc Oral, one of our SOA Consortium members, shares insights yet again, this time from the Enterprise Architecture SIG meeting of ACT/IAC.

On June 20th, I attended the Enterprise Architecture SIG meeting in Falls Church, VA organized by ACT/IAC.

The meeting agenda comprised of a talk by Dr. Carolyn Strano and short presentations on status of sub working groups/projects. Among many projects this SIG has, I focused on the Shared Services and SOA Guidance Project and MDA. Others are

• ERP and Integration
• Collaboration
• Data Architecture
• Model Driven Architecture
• Chief Architects Forum, ArchitecturePlus, Government support.

Dr. Strano talked about the Role of Enterprise Architect in the Federal Government. This topic is closely related to the efforts of the Enterprise Architecture 2010 Working Group at the SOA Consortium. As a part of the Ground Floor SOA, we have been closely working on this subject and the research provided by Dr. Strano is very valuable. I will be sharing the presentation with the consortium members.

Here are my notes.

Dr. Strano interviewed several architects at the federal government, reviewed position and vacancy descriptions, and researched the activities of the architects at the US executive branch. Using the grounded theory process, she analyzed her findings about the role of the enterprise architects. Her talk covered

• Functional roles of an enterprise architect
• Value of an enterprise architect
• Benefits of an enterprise architect
• Competencies of an enterprise architect
• Organizational positioning of an enterprise architect
• Functional interfaces of an enterprise architect
• Dependency factors for an enterprise architect

Dr. Strano’s concludes that an enterprise architect has a multi-dimensional role in which s/he has to provide a “maestro view” of the enterprise and translate strategy into actionable plans towards a shared vision.

Dave Mayo briefed on the activities of the SOA and shared services guidance. IT turnes out that their document is prepared for the Federal CIO council. Earlier outline was asked to be reworked as well as the people working on it. They are now working on

• Rationale
• Business benefits
• SOA/SOI/SOE design and concept
• Target architecture
• Keys for Implementation
• Roadmap and maturity Model

September/October is the timeframe for the CIO council and OMB review.