In this members-only meeting, the Architecture Forum progressed work on TOGAF Version
9, and in addition they received reports on a number of important ongoing
projects and liaisons.
The presentations and detailed minutes of these proceedings are
available from the Architecture
Forum members' web site.
Topics covered:
Election of Architecture Forum Officers for
2006
In a closely fought election, David Jackson of IBM was elected Chair of
the Architecture Forum for 2006, and Dave van Gelder of Capgemini was
elected the Forum's European Vice-Chair.
There will now be an election for Americas Vice-Chair, the position
that David Jackson had previously held, and which is now vacant following
David's election as Chair.
Other officers elected were Thomas Obitz of Infosys Technologies and
Judith Jones of Architecting-the-Enterprise, who are the Architecture
Forum's Primary and Alternate Representatives (respectively) to The Open
Group Customer Council; and Vish Vismanathan of CC&C Solutions, who
remains the Forum's Vice Chair - Australasia/Pacific.
The Forum also agreed a proposal to create a new Vice Chair - Africa,
and appointed Stuart Macgregor of Real IRM, The Open Group representative
in South Africa, as Vice Chair - Africa for 2006.
Architecture Terminology BoF
The agenda was extended by the addition of a session in the
morning of Thursday January 26 to enable an informal Birds-of-a Feather (BoF) session to take place to discuss architecture
terminology.
This session built on earlier BoFs, and included a presentation by
Thomas Obitz of Infosys Technologies on an Infosys White Paper on
architecture terminology.
This work will be progressed in future meetings.
The APC earlier in the week had already featured detailed expositions
by the various work leaders of their respective domains:
- Business Context
- Architecture Development
- Architecture-based Business Transformation
- Architecture Deployment
- Architecture Value Realization
- Architecture Management
In the members' meeting there was a detailed discussion of the necessary
acceptance criteria for publication of snapshots of the TOGAF9 work for
internal review.
The workshop opened with a status update by Judith Jones of
Architecting-the-Enterprise, leader of the overall TOGAF9
development program.
The leaders of the various subprojects in TOGAF9:
Judith Jones, Architecting-the-Enterprise
Simon Dalziel, Architecting-the-Enterprise
Bob Weisman, CGI
Dave Harrison, Architecting-the-Enterprise (represented here by
Judith Jones)
Stuart Macgregor, Real IRM
presented a high-level review of the work-in-progress in their
respective areas.
Graham Bird, The Open Group VP Marketing, gave an update on the marketing of
TOGAF.
The Open Group's key market messages are now: Architecture, Boundarylessness, and
Certification - ABC.
TOGAF and the IT Architect Certification program have received
significant press coverage in the last quarter. Architecture Forum members can help by representing
their organizations at other conferences and featuring The Open Group and
TOGAF.
The Open Group is proposing to replace the current on-line text of
TOGAF Version 8 with technically equivalent text corresponding to the
chapter structure of the TOGAF Version 8 book published in September 2005.
In addition, the TOGAF web site has undergone a significant redesign, and
the new, improved design is planned to be introduced along with the new text
structure. These
materials had been made available for sanity review by the
Architecture Forum ahead of the meeting, and were warmly endorsed by the
members present. A system of redirects will be introduced, so that
existing hard-coded hyperlinks will continue to route to the appropriate
parts of the new text.
TOGAF and ITIL
Judith Jones of Architecting-the-Enterprise gave an update on the
liaison between The Open Group and the IT Service Management Forum (itSMF),
where the ITIL body of knowledge is developed.
ITIL is about to undergo a significant refresh, and there are
opportunities for synergy between the IT Service Management Forum (itSMF)
and The Open Group overall, in particular the Architecture Forum.
Working agreements have been reached between the TOGAF9 development
team and the IT Service Management Forum on key terminology in both the
architecture development and service management areas.
MDA/TOGAF Synergy
This work involves collaboration between three separate consortia - The
Open Group, OMG, and the Integration Consortium.
On Wednesday January 23, the modeling sub-group of the joint working
group had met to progress the work on modeling the TOGAF ADM using the MDA standard SPEM
metamodel.
This work will be progressed in future meetings of the joint group.
David Jackson of IBM is leading the
Architecture
Forum's involvement in this work, with Ed Harrison of Data Access Technologies (a member
of both The Open Group Architecture Forum and OMG) acting as the chair of the joint group.
David gave a brief status report on the Synergy project, and invited
anyone who was interested to become engaged in the work.
DODAF/TOGAF Harmonization Update
The DODAF/TOGAF Synergy project team, under the leadership of Rolf Siegers of
Raytheon, has been working to align the TOGAF Architecture Development Method with the
products of the DODAF framework, with leading experts from both fields seeking to
establish synergy between the two frameworks.
Judith Jones of Architecting-the-Enterprise, a member of the working
group, gave a brief status report on the work of this project
team, including plans to develop a detailed mapping between the two frameworks as a White
Paper. It is hoped to publish the White Paper in time for the next
Members' Conference in Washington, DC, in April 2006.
SOA WG/Architecture Forum Joint Session
On Thursday January 26 there was an informal joint session between
the Architecture Forum and the members of the ad hoc SOA Working Group, to brief each other on current status
and plans in the area of SOA, and to agree liaison mechanisms.
This session was led by Bill Estrem of Metaplexity Associates.
Bill presented the work that he and Ian McCall of IBM
are jointly leading on extending the Standards Information Base to a Building Blocks
Information Base, as a repository of information on architecture building blocks,
reference models, and architecture patterns - now termed an Architecture
Information Base.
This session was led by Graham Meaden of Celestial Consulting.
Besides the work being undertaken in collaboration with the members of
the ITAC team (see Architecture Terminology BoF, above)
the Architecture Forum has its own project in this area, currently focused
specifically on terminology for TOGAF Version 9.
Graham gave an update on the development of a taxonomy for TOGAF
Version 9.
Architecture Tools
David Jackson, IBM, and Jane Varnus, Bank of Montreal, jointly led a
discussion on experiences on use of tools for enterprise architecture
work, and on possibilities for getting TOGAF adopted as a part of a
planned open source architecture toolkit and workbench based on
Eclipse.
Judith Jones, Architecting-the-Enterprise, led a session on planning
for further work on TOGAF9.
The work to date has produced a great deal of value-add to the existing
TOGAF8, and it is important that the introduction of the new material in
TOGAF9 be properly integrated with TOGAF8.
Plans were agreed for development of acceptance criteria for the
further development of TOGAF9 and gating criteria for submission of the
draft to internal review by the Architecture Forum.
