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Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference
April 21-23 2008, Glasgow, Scotland

"Successful Enterprise Architecture"

Objective of Meeting

The Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conferences are organized by Enterprise Architecture practitioners, for Enterprise Architecture practitioners, and for those directly involved in the management and oversight of Enterprise Architecture. 

The Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference at Glasgow addressed some of the key issues and challenges that face Enterprise Architects today. In this highly practical three-day conference and series of workshops, Open Group members and non-members alike came together to share insights and perspectives on best practices in Enterprise Architecture. 

The conference underlined the continuing role of The Open Group in providing a truly global forum in which Enterprise Architects from all sectors of the industry can come together to discuss best practice in Enterprise Architecture, hone their skills, find new ways to solve problems, share experiences, and learn from each other. 

Summary

The agenda for this Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference covered 65 individual presentations, structured into three half-day plenaries plus 17 streams across three parallel tracks.

Each day included a mix of plenary presentations, with industry leaders from near and far sharing their insights on the day’s theme; and a set of parallel streams examining specific areas in depth. The various streams delivered innovative viewpoints, practical insights, and case study presentations by enterprise architecture professionals from both vendor and customer organizations; and provided experience-based insight into the approaches and methods that have proved most effective for developing architectures around the world. 

The event as a whole provided a wealth of current case study and tutorial material. The proceedings are reported below under separate daily headings:

The presentations referenced below are freely available only to members of The Open Group and conference attendees.

Monday April 21 2008:  TOGAF™ and Enterprise Architecture

Opening Plenary

The Open Group’s 18th Architecture Practitioners Conference kicked off on Monday April 21 with industry leaders from around the world convening to share their insights on the theme of “TOGAF™ and Enterprise Architecture”.

  • Welcome Address
    Allen Brown, President & CEO, The Open Group
    Allen gave attendees from around the world a warm welcome to Glasgow and to the opening day plenary. 
  • Architecture as an Enabler for Sustainability
    Dr. Tom Urquhart, Global Architecture Leader, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP
    Following Allen's opening remarks, Dr. Tom Urquhart delivered his presentation, in which he discussed the increased pressures on global business to address sustainability ( the "green agenda") both in IT and in wider business processes. Ensuring responsible and minimal environmental impact is high on the agenda of most organizations today. Businesses will increasingly be subject to employee, shareholder, and customer pressures to demonstrate their green commitments or face consumer backlash and even loss of investors. However, the majority of organizations today have little or no visibility of their environmental footprints or an understanding of how to reduce them. Many business leaders simply don’t know where to start, he said, in achieving sustainability. Architecture practitioners can play a leading role in improving this situation, by increasing business understanding and ensuring joined-up business, information, systems, and communications architectures. In IT, architectural analysis can expose improvement opportunities in procurement and partnerships, energy and waste management, the use of technologies to reduce travel needs and reporting, along with an awareness of the environmental impacts of products and services from conception to completion. For each business process, service, and IT function, he said, we now need to directly consider sustainability. He recommended adapting architectural principles for sustainability, so that ultimately IT can enable sustainable business processes. Sustainability is one of the key issues that management in both the public and private sector are facing today – and architects are well-placed to help them.
  • Strategic Steps in Enterprise Architecture - Transforming ICT in Education
    Sarah Porter, Head of Innovation, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)
    Sarah Porter is Head of Innovation at JISC, whose mission is to provide world-class leadership in the innovative use of ICT to support education and research. Higher education in the UK is a 26 billion euro economic sector and spends 1 billion euro annually on ICT, part of the 3.5 billion euro UK market to ICT in education. With funding under pressure and competition for students increasing, the community is at the early stages of adopting enterprise architecture methods to improve the effectiveness and impact of ICT investment. Sarah explained that, although innovation is important to the higher education sector, it is still in the evolutionary phase, and so JISC is assisting in creating more flexible and responsive systems, policies, and business processes. Enterprise architectures are tremendously useful in creating innovation for higher education, because they can support it from all sides. JISC currently has three pilot projects at early-adopter UK universities, all of which have implemented enterprise architectures and undergone TOGAF training. The goal is to build a community of enterprise architects within the UK higher education system who can learn from The Open Group’s membership base.
  • Business Analysis and Enterprise Architecture
    Dave van Gelder, Global Architect, Capgemini Nederland BV
    Dave van Gelder is chairman of the Group of Experts and member of the Advisory Board for the European Register of Information Architects and chair of the Business Architecture Work Group of The Open Group. Dave gave a presentation emphasizing the need for business analysis to be integrated effectively with the discipline of enterprise architecture. The ongoing evolution of technology creates freedom in two ways:  opportunities for new value and innovation; and freeing ourselves from current constraints. In this vein, he advocated that organizations be able to have “processes on the fly” and obtain data whenever they want. Business analysts enter the picture because realizing the above flexibilities is not simple – it requires more than IT alone. A well-defined enterprise architecture must span both IT and non-IT domains, and is able to act as a steward for implementation. Thus, Dave said that a standardization of business analysis is crucial. He encouraged more dialog amongst workers in business analysis and encouraged The Open Group to take the lead in the further development and standardization in this field. 
  • Architecting the Sun
    Daniel Berg, Distinguished Engineer, CTO Global Sales & Services, and VP EMEA Systems Engineering, Sun Microsystems
    Daniel began by giving an overview of Sun’s involvement in The Open Group, which includes certifying 130 TOGAF practitioners in the past two months. He then discussed how Sun sees enterprise architecture and what changes they are making, along with how changes in IT at large have helped revolutionize architecture. First and foremost, the “participation economy” drives demand for dynamic architectures that support rapid delivery of new services, as opposed to the older, static architecture models. In addition, he discussed changes that Sun is seeing in data center functions, infrastructures, and systems operations models.

Parallel Streams

STREAM A1: Business-Driven SOA

Host: Tony Carrato, World-Wide Chief Operations Architect, EIS SOA Advanced Technology, IBM; and SOA Working Group Co-Chair

STREAM B1: TOGAF™ Case Studies

Host: David Jackson, Armstrong Process Group, Inc. (US)

STREAM C1: Enterprise Architecture Best Practice Management

Host: Tim O'Neill, Avolution (Australia)

STREAM A2: SOA and TOGAF™

Host: E.G. Nadhan, Lead Technologist, EDS

STREAM B2: Enterprise Architecture Development

Host: Sarina Viljoen, RealIRM (South Africa)

STREAM C2: Enterprise Architecture Best Practice Management (continued)

Tuesday April 22 2008: The Architecture Profession

Opening Plenary

Day two of the Glasgow Architecture Practitioners Conference began with a plenary focused on the Architecture Profession.

  • Welcome Address
    Allen Brown, President & CEO, The Open Group
    Allen welcomed everyone to the second day plenary.
  • Socialization and Syndication – The Ignored Half of Architecture
    Murat Erder, Director, Deloitte Ltd.
    Typical views of architects, Murat explained, range from the ivory tower to the gatekeepers. Most architecture departments focus on building the architecture, yet socialization and syndication are equally, if not more, important. Two key parts of such are: how you market the model; and governance – how you maintain projects and continuously provide value to the organization. Architects must deploy soft skills as well as technical skills, and also recognize the culture of the organization. Murat took the audience through the key elements of a successful architecture project, including vision, communications, financials, transition planning, organization, process, and tools. TOGAF™, he said, recognizes the importance of governance and stakeholder management.
  • An Enterprise Architecture Career Development Program Based on TOGAF and ITAC
    Paul van de Merwe, Consulting Manager, Real IRM
    Paul is Consulting Manager with Real IRM, who are The Open Group's representative in South Africa. In his presentation, Paul said that developing an enterprise architecture career requires skills and experience across five architectural types: business, information, data, application, and technology. He then described the frameworks that Real IRM uses to gauge an architect’s career against the characteristics required by TOGAF and ITAC. The firm found that incorporating the technical, business, and general skills required by both the framework and the certification gave the most complete picture of an architect’s career development. Within their final enterprise architecture career development framework, Paul and his colleagues include three dimensions: the five architectural domains; the capabilities that each architect would like to be able to deliver; and proficiency levels.
  • Introducing ArchiMate®
    Between speakers, Dennis Kerssens, Principal Architect with Getronics, Netherlands, took a moment to introduce ArchiMate®, an international language for modeling and visualizing Enterprise Architecture. The ArchiMate language is being transferred to The Open Group and will be maintained and further developed by the newly formed Open Group ArchiMate Forum.
  • What Top IT Architects and Specialists Have in Common
    Gerard Coes, Capgemini Academy, Clustermanager Business & ICT
    Gerard started on a light note, providing a caricature of an IT Architect and involving the audience in a stand-up/sit-down exercise. He then delved into the real characteristics of top IT Architects and IT Specialists, including education, skills, experience, recognition, and certification. He also outlined the shared certification criteria between The Open Group ITAC and ITSC programs. The two professions, he said, are both necessary to creating a connected and consistent portfolio of IT systems and solutions. He encouraged collaboration between the professions in order to realize many benefits: complete architecture plans, implemented IT systems, consistency, fewer interfaces between systems, and adoption of standards.
  • Dealing With People You Can't Stand!
    Sheila Thorne, Worldwide IT Specialist Profession Leader, IBM
    In her presentation, Sheila advised knowing the type of situation and people you’re working with, particularly the other person’s power situation. She then delved into specifics of interacting with other people in a team situation, using anecdotes along the way to illustrate her points. Issues arise mostly when people are pushed beyond their normal states, she said, so what really happens when people snap? She provided four overlapping categories of people - passive, aggressive, task-focused, and people-focused – and gave advice on dealing with (and being) each one. Final takeaways included letting go of dramatic internal thoughts; identifying the positive intent of a project; and keeping the end game in mind.

Parallel Streams

STREAM A3: SOA Case Studies

Host: Dave Hornford, Hornford Associates (Canada)

STREAM B3: Enterprise Architecture Development (continued)

Host: Judith Jones, CEO, Architecting-the-Enterprise Ltd. (UK)

STREAM C3: The Open Group Certification Programs

Host: James de Raeve, VP  Certification, The Open Group (UK)

STREAM A4: Semantics for SOA

Host: Chris Harding, Forum Director for Semantic Interoperability and SOA, The Open Group

STREAM B4: Enterprise Architecture Modeling and Tools

Host: Harmen van den Berg, BiZZdesign (Netherlands)

STREAM C4: The Business Architecture Working Group and the Enterprise Architecture Profession

Wednesday April 23 2008: Leveraging SOA in Enterprise Architecture

Opening Plenary

The plenary on Wednesday focused on the theme of "Leveraging SOA in Enterprise Architecture".

  • Welcome Address
    Allen Brown, President & CEO, The Open Group
    Allen welcomed everyone to the third day plenary.
  • Legacy SOA – Bringing SOA Into the Real World
    Josh Street, Technology Strategist, Bank of America
    Josh supports technology strategy for Bank of America's Treasury and Payments Technology Division. In his presentation, he discussed project challenges that organizations face when implementing SOA. Key to a successful implementation, he said, is establishing the problem you want to solve, such as agility or simplification. Architects also need to determine what they are managing and measuring for in order to show progress and dollar value to executives. Additionally, architects must understand the business – which is different from the strategy – before implementing the technology, because SOA is really about understanding the business in order to make it more agile. Finally, Josh provided recommendations on setting standards for implementation and creating a governance body.
  • Fighting SOA Fatigue with Effective Enterprise Architecture
    Chris Howard, VP & Director, Executive Advisory Program, Burton Group
    Besides being VP & Director, Executive Advisory Program, at Burton Group, Chris has been part of the academic community for more than 16 years, as an associate professor and guest lecturer at major schools in North America and Europe. In his presentation, Chris discussed current perceptions of SOA and the key role of the enterprise architecture discipline as a critical component of SOA success. Reaching SOA maturity is happening more slowly than anyone thought. He discussed some of the challenges in the space: myriad vendor messages, along with challenges within the technical, design, project, and management realms. There are also real risks, such as unaddressed cultural problems leading to SOA silos and the fact that business is used to not being engaged with IT. Enterprise architecture, however, when used correctly, is outcome-oriented and makes good design easier. Thus, enterprise architecture provides fit and context for SOA projects. Chris cautioned against overemphasis on SOA in isolation, which distracts from enterprise goals and business relevance. SOA fatigue is real, so what we really need to do is to raise the level of conversation higher.
  • Operationalizing SOA
    Tony Carrato, WW Chief Operations Architect, EIS SOA Advanced Technology, IBM
    Tony is Co-Chair of The Open Group SOA Working Group, and Worldwide Chief Operations Architect of IBM Software Group's SOA Advanced Technology team. In his presentation, Tony focused on the deployment and management phases of SOA projects. Most discussions to date have been about the front end, he said, but now we actually have to run and support them. He encouraged the audience to think about SOA in operation, because end users care more about running systems than they do about architectures, development approaches, etc. Architects should start the dialog early with the operations team, and then, when designing systems, consider the operational concerns within the context of architectural issues. The SOA Working Group and others in The Open Group are researching these topics, and Tony encouraged the audience to get involved. 
  • PANEL SESSION:  Deploying SOA Throughout the Enterprise
    Moderated by Dr. Chris Harding, Forum Director, The Open Group
    With panelists: Josh Street, Technology Strategist, Bank of America, Chris Howard, VP & Director, Executive Advisory Program, Burton Group, and Tony Carrato, WW Chief Operations Architect, EIS SOA Advanced Technology, IBM
    The plenary ended with a panel Q&A on the deployment of SOA throughout the enterprise. After starting with an informal poll of the audience, the panel answered questions covering a range of SOA issues. Topics discussed included project momentum; the need for proper governance; managing failures and analyzing successes; how SOA is going to evolve; and the importance of semantics – what things are called – in SOA projects. The panelists also touched on the cultural differences that SOA projects introduce and encouraged attendees to focus on the business capabilities and simply executing the project.

Parallel Streams

STREAM A5: SOA and Enterprise Architecture

Host: Ed Harrington, Executive VP & COO, Model Driven Solutions

STREAM B5: Enterprise Architecture and Business Value

Host: Dave van Gelder, Capgemini (Netherlands)

STREAM C5: Enterprise Architecture Case Studies

Host: Eric Boulay, CEO, Arismore (France)

STREAM A6: SOA Governance

Host: Craig R. Martin, Director, Knotion Consulting

STREAM B6: Business Architecture

Host: Dave van Gelder, Capgemini (Netherlands)

STREAM C6: AOGEA

Outputs

The presentations, tutorials, and workshops at the meeting, and the associated discussions and panel sessions, all provided participants with a wealth of experience-based insight into current best practice in enterprise architecture, from leading experts and practitioners around the world.

Participants at this unique event were able to:

  • Participate in highly practical workshops and tutorials teaching best enterprise architecture practices
  • Review case studies from organizations who have put theory into practice, and learn from them what works and what doesn't
  • See demonstrations and presentations on leading tools supporting open architecture methods
  • Network with leading architecture experts, vendors, and peers in the enterprise architecture field

Next Steps

This 18th Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference was a great success, confirming the global need for this unique series of events.

The next Enterprise Architecture Practitioners' Conferences will be held in Johannesburg, South Africa, June 4-6; and in Chicago, US, July 21-23, in association with The Open Group Member Meetings, July 21-25. 

If you are interested in presenting at Johannesburg, Chicago, or other Enterprise Architecture Practitioners' Conferences, then please submit a Presentation Proposal.

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