Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘enterprise architecture’

Mar 6

Security Model

The (real) problem with Cloud Security

A real gap has appeared between how Cloud vendors and their customers perceive security. In a recent survey, that 69% of vendors believe security is primarily a cloud customer responsibility, but only 35 percent of them believe security is their responsibility only. Just 16 percent of cloud providers feel security is a shared responsibility, compared to 33 percent of cloud users.

Although security has repeatedly been highlighted as one of the key concerns with Cloud Computing, only 20 percent of cloud vendors see security as a competitive advantage, and fewer than 27 percent feel their cloud services can protect and secure customer information.

Why is there such a gap? Read more

Apr 22

ea

What is Enterprise Architecture and did it really die?

The recent year or so have offered amble blogosphere discussion about what Enterprise Architecture is, whether it died and who to blame. It appears that John Zachman kicked off the debate back in 2009 with his blog post Yes, “Enterprise Architecture is Relative” BUT it is not Arbitrary, where he claims that Enterprise Architecture is dying due to the extensive overuse of ‘architecture’ for everything in IT. This generated a very extensive debate on Linkedin (summarised here) which also extended into what Enterprise Architecture is and what Enterprise Architects do. The debate does seem to get lost in roles and responsibilities, models, and fuzzy terminology.

Rather than offering another summary or yet another random definition, I find it useful to think about an Enterprise, as the combination of an organisation and its ability to use IT – and doing two things to achieve this: planning and delivery. The combination is the above matrix. Organisations use Information Technology in order to achieve an advantage that otherwise wouldn’t be possible – an advantage that might enable the organisation to reduce cost, deliver new products and services or re-design the organisation itself (to create other advantages).

Organisations’ IT deal with:

  • The planning of IT generally consists of two types: 1) a strategy for the IT systems, e.g., technology choice, the roles of each system, etc, and; 2) the management of the portfolio of IT related activities such as projects and operational support.
  • The delivery of IT is the delivery of actual IT systems and the execution of IT projects.

Organisations’ ability to use IT deals how the organisation itself needs to be structured and behave in order to realise the potential benefits offered by a set of available IT:

  • The planning of organisational IT ability covers the identification of appropriate governance models, or organisational capabilities such knowledge management, social architecture or a unique organisational structure.
  • The delivery of organisational IT ability covers what management literature label as organisational change management or transformation.

Now if one then takes the view that Enterprise Architecture is all of the matrix, then EA is far from dead – most organisations would be doing this to some degree.

But if one views architecture as ‘the fundamental organization of a system‘ (as defined by IEEE’s standard for the description of IT systems), then maybe EA is dying because there is so much more to an Enterprise than its fundamental organisation – in other words, EA is dying because the architecture analogy is a poor analogy for today’s Enterprises?

Apr 10

social networks
2 Comments

The Social Enterprise – what problem are we trying to solve?

Social Computing along with Cloud Computing is one of the hot IT buzz words – i.e., the Social Cloud must then be the ultimate in buzz word compliance. This is in fact what Andrew McAfee from MIT’s Management school and Mike Gotta from Cisco are discussing.

Andrew presents his Enterprise 2.0 the Indian Way in a recent blog post. He describes a project done internally at Tata Consulting Services, where they build a social collaboration tool to rate and share the broad collection of project derived knowledge. It sounds deceptively simple, but on the other hand, I have seen the results from a number of similar projects deploying a very structured, formal approach to knowledge sharing – and none of those worked very well – so why not? The real trick at TCS didn’t seem to be so much about the tool, but what motivated the TCS consultants to engage. You could call it a bottom up approach to the Social Enterprise.

The opposite example is presented by Mike Gotta in his presentation: Build an Architecture of Participation. I have to warn you, it is heavy on models, slides etc. Although he is discussing the same thing, it is probably more of what you’d call a top down approach to the Social Enterprise.

What’s missing from both the blog post Read more

Mar 22

Door paard getrokken taxi

Enterprise Architecture – the search for a faster horse?

Len Fehskens from The Open Group recently wrote an interesting article for The Open Group blog titled ‘Enterprise Architecture’s Quest for its Identity‘ (and subsequently recycled at ZDNet and SOA World Magazine), where he poses two questions:

  1. Is enterprise architecture primarily about IT or is it about the entire enterprise?
  2. Is enterprise architecture a “hard” discipline or a “soft” discipline?

Len argues in favour of Enterprise Architecture as a soft discipline concerned with the entire enterprise and not just IT. But I would have liked Len to have addressed the ‘why?’ part better – often identity is derived from the purpose of doing it. He makes a few references to ‘descriptions’ of an enterprise. But as Todd Biske pointed out, the relevance of Enterprise Architecture is determined by the whether the Architects of an enterprise are Enterprise Archivist (model focused) or Enterprise Activist (engagement focused). Read more