The Architecture Forum meeting comprised the following sessions:
This Birds-Of-a Feather (BoF) meeting was a joint session between the Architecture Forum and the IT
Architect Certification team, to progress the ongoing work on architecture
terminology.
This session built on earlier BoFs, and included a presentation by Graham Meaden of Celestial Consulting, who is leading the
Architecture Forum's involvement in this joint activity. Graham
presented a strawman ontology,
which was refined during the week.
This work will be progressed in future teleconferences and meetings.
Workshop on Architecture Forum Scope, Structure,
and Processes
David Jackson of IBM, Chair of the Architecture Forum, led a
workshop to review the Forum's decision-making processes.
The Architecture Forum has grown from a very small group to over 100
organizations worldwide in five years. This growth - coupled with the
emergence of TOGAF as a leading industry standard within the industry - has
led to the need for greater rigor in the way the Forum
operates.
This workshop gave the members of the Forum the opportunity to review
strawman proposals developed by the Forum's officer team elected in
January 2006, and to plan a way forward to a new charter based on this
more rigorous foundation.
In parallel with its main meeting, the TOGAF9 development team held a
two-day working meeting in preparation for the handover of the TOGAF9
draft from the TOGAF9 development team to the Forum at large, for
internal review.
At Barcelona, a set of gating criteria had been defined by the wider
Forum for the acceptance of the TOGAF9 draft for Forum review. In this
workshop, the development team finalized its submissions against these
criteria, for presentation to the Forum in plenary later in the
week.
James de Raeve, VP Certification, The Open Group, presented
an update on
the work of the IT Architect Certification team, and led a discussion
on ways in which the Architecture Forum - in particular its IT customer
members - could help to promulgate the program internally and promote the
procurement of IT Architecture services based on IT Architect
Certification.
Project Update: Architecture Marketing
Graham Bird, VP Marketing, The Open Group, gave an update
on the marketing of Architecture in general, and the Architecture Forum
and TOGAF in particular, by The Open Group.
Architecture Forum members can help by representing
their organizations at other conferences and featuring The Open Group, the
Architecture Forum, and TOGAF.
The Open Group is proposing to replace the current online 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. 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.
Graham Meaden of Celestial Consulting, who is leading the
Architecture Forum's involvement in this joint activity, gave the Forum
at large an update on the BoF that had been held earlier in the meeting,
and invited further discussion by the Forum on this activity.
This work is currently focused on TOGAF9 and the ITAC program, but in
the longer term will expand to embrace terminology in earlier versions
of TOGAF, and in other bodies of work outside The Open Group.
In this joint session, Chris Harding, the Forum Director supporting
the SOA Working Group, presented an update on the work of the group,
including:
This joint session then discussed areas of synergy between the two
bodies, and in particular the three specific projects in which the
Architecture Forum was invited by the SOA-WG to participate:
- SOA Relationship to EA (TOGAF)
- SOA Reference Model
- Ontologies for SOA
These project proposals were considered later in the week by the
Architecture Forum and further steps agreed on development of project
briefs.
Project Update: Architecture Tools
At Barcelona, three members of the Architecture Forum - Jane Varnus of Bank of Montreal,
Chris Forde of Amex, and Serge Thorne of Serono International - had agreed
to confer on the subject of user requirements for TOGAF8 Tool Support
certification, and to report back to the Forum at this meeting.
It had also been agreed that Thomas Obitz and Judith Jones would consult
other customer members of
the Architecture Forum on this topic, and pursue it through the Customer
Council.
Jane Varnus presented the results of the group's work in-between the two meetings. Action on the
group's findings was deferred to later in the meeting, following the Forum's
discussions of decision-making.
Reviving the Customer Council in the Architecture
Forum
Thomas Obitz of Infosys Technologies is the Architecture Forum's Primary
Representative to The Open Group Customer Council (Judith Jones of
Architecting-the-Enterprise being the Alternate Representative).
Thomas presented
his ideas on reviving the Customer Council, and making the customer voice
heard within the Architecture Forum, which were very well received.
MDA/TOGAF Synergy - Collaboration with OMG
and the Integration Consortium
Ed Harrison of Data Access Technologies (a member of
both The Open Group Architecture Forum and OMG) is chair of the working
group that is a joint initiative with the OMG and the Integration Consortium.
There are
three project areas:
- A mapping between the TOGAF Architecture Development Method and
OMG's MDA standards
- A proof-of-concept of the application of this mapping, based on
the TEAMS project
- Modeling of the TOGAF ADM process using OMG's SPEM modeling
standard
Ed gave a status report on
the work of the group, which had been underway since 2002. Ed also gave
an update on the third project area, on behalf of Chris Armstrong,
who is leading that project area.
The work is progressed by frequent teleconferences, and less frequent
face-to-face meetings, the next of which is planned for the Integration
Consortium's Global Integration Summit meeting at Boston in May
2006.
The Architecture Information Base is the term now being proposed for what
has previously been referred to as the "MetaSIB". This is work
that Bill Estrem of Metaplexity Associates 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.
Bill Estrem presented his latest thoughts on this topic,
and there was
lively discussion.
Project Update: DODAF/TOGAF Harmonization
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.
Rolf gave an update
on the work of this project team, including plans to complete a detailed
mapping between the two frameworks as a White Paper before the next meeting
in Miami, July 2006.
Project Update: Management
ADM/Collaboration with Enterprise Management Forum
David Jackson of IBM, Chair of the Architecture Forum, gave an
overview of this project, in which David and Michael Barrett of Johnson &
Johnson will work with the Enterprise Management Forum to develop a White Paper providing guidance on the information that
needs to be collected in order to create the Manageability View of the
architecture, and the manageability considerations that need to be taken into
account in specific ADM phases.
This TOGAF
ADM Management White Paper is analogous to the ADM Security White Paper
that has recently been published in collaboration with the Security Forum.
Maturing the Enterprise Architecture Process
in a Large Corporation
The Architecture Forum received a presentation
from Ken Hales of Eskom (South Africa), a recent new customer member of
the Forum.
Eskom had recently undergone an exercise in integrating and
harmonizing the disparate architecture disciplines within a number of
merged business lines, and Ken gave the Forum the benefit of Eskom's
lessons learned from this experience.
Liaisons Update: COBIT
Stuart Macgregor of Real IRM, who participates in both ISACA/COBIT and
TOGAF9 development, is leading the liaison with ISACA to discuss
harmonization between COBIT and TOGAF.
Stuart reported
that he was doing a detailed mapping between the recently published COBIT4
standards and TOGAF8.1 for the Architecture Forum, and that he had also done a similar map
from the COBIT4 structure to TOGAF8.1 for ISACA. Legal agreements between
the two organizations still needed to be finalized, and he was aiming to have a
draft of the mapping White Paper out in the near future.
The longer-term aim was to
then use that mapping as a basis for incorporating similar links between
COBIT4 and TOGAF9; e.g., to link from TOGAF9 to specific COBIT control
objectives.
Architecture Forum Academic Chapter
Mike Lambert, Fellow of The Open Group and Lecturer at Reading University,
reported that he wanted to set up an academic chapter within the
Architecture Forum, with a view to gaining agreement on a common university
curriculum for IT Architecture and using TOGAF as a body of knowledge. TOGAF
Certification was increasingly becoming a requirement, and university
courses were as eligible for certification as any others.
The idea was welcomed by the Forum, but a final decision was deferred
pending the outcome of the Forum's discussions on its decision-making
processes and new structures.
Liaisons Update: ITIL
Judith Jones, Architecting-the-Enterprise, is liaising with the IT
Service Management Forum (itSMF), guardians of the official ITIL
documentation, as part of the TOGAF9 development work, and gave a status
report.
Members of The Open Group Enterprise Management Forum participated in the
discussions.
Aidan Lawes, CEO of itSMF
UK & International, had been invited to present at the New York APC to
discuss ITIL in July 2005, and Judith had since been invited back to present at
ITIL-UK
and discuss further. Judith had reached agreement with the itSMF
Steering Group, who are guiding the development of the new ITIL materials, to swap terminology
definitions.
Project Update: TOGAF8
The Architecture Forum had agreed at its Barcelona meeting to undertake a
quality review of the existing TOGAF8.1 documentation. John
Spencer, Director of the Architecture Forum, and Judith Jones, Leader of the
TOGAF9 development program, jointly gave an update on the TOGAF8.1 review.
88 comments had been submitted to the TOGAF Version 8.1 review by Forum
members, and in addition a set of 6 comments on the TOGAF book that had
previously been submitted by a non-member were deemed to be within scope and
were included in the review.
These comments had been reviewed by a
review group comprising the team currently working on TOGAF9 development plus
any other members of the Forum interested in participating in the review.
Most of the recommendations on the review comments had been successfully
balloted prior to the Washington meeting, and at the meeting the Forum agreed
the recommended dispositions of all remaining comments.
Project Update: TOGAF9
The Architecture Forum had agreed at its Barcelona meeting that
acceptance criteria should be developed for the further development of
TOGAF9, together with gating criteria for the submission of the TOGAF9 draft
to internal review by the Architecture Forum.
At Washington, further work was done on refining the acceptance and gating
criteria, and the Forum agreed that the items mandated at Barcelona had been
sufficiently addressed to the point where it was now in order to release the
TOGAF9 draft and the acceptance and gating criteria themselves to the Forum at
large for internal review.
As usual, there were a number of additional discussion items that
were raised on the final day of the meeting:
- A presentation by Rich
Hilliard, Secretary of the IEEE 1471
Architecture Working Group, on the current status of work on the
1471 standard.
- Further discussion on decision items deferred earlier in the
week:
- Academic Chapter
- Architecture Marketing: Invitation to all members with an
interest to help The Open Group Marketing department in
marketing The Open Group's architecture activities and
achievements, and the development of marketing support artifacts
- Architecture Tools: Agreement on a data gathering exercise
under the leadership of Thomas Obitz, Primary Customer Council
Representative
- Board Report
- Customer Council: Customer-focused research in the
architecture space
- Forum Communications
- Forum Meeting Structure: Parallel versus plenary sessions
- ITAC: Request for IT customer organizations to reference ITAC
when procuring architecture services
- SOA: The proposals of the SOA-WG for joint SOA-WG/Architecture Forum collaboration
- TOGAF Certification Renewal
- TOGAF Product Development Lifecycle: Strawman proposals by
Stuart Macgregor of Real IRM, Graham Meaden of Celestial
Consulting, and Ken Hales of Eskom (Overview
and Strawman
Process)
Overall, it was a highly fruitful and successful week.
