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

Highlights of Day One

The Open Group’s 18th Architecture Practitioners Conference kicked off on Monday, April 21st in Glasgow. Industry leaders from near and far convened at the Radisson SAS to share their insights on SOA, TOGAF™, and the Enterprise Architecture profession.

Allen Brown, President & CEO, The Open Group, gave opening remarks, kicking off the Day One "TOGAF™ and Enterprise Architecture" plenary session. Allen welcomed attendees from both sides of the Atlantic.

Following Allen’s opening remarks, Dr. Tom Urquhart, Global Architecture Leader, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, delivered his presentation "Architecture as an Enabler for Sustainability". Tom discussed how architecture can facilitate increasingly important sustainable business. Many business leaders simply don’t know where to start, he said, in achieving sustainability. Thus, he discussed the role of enterprise architecture in helping to achieve this by looking at the entire picture, from business demands to IT requirements. 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.

Next, Sarah Porter, Head of Innovation, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), delivered her presentation "Strategic Steps in Enterprise Architecture - Transforming ICT in Education". JISC’s goal is to provide leadership in the innovative use of ICT to support education and research. Although innovation is so important to the higher education sector, it is still in the evolutionary phase, so JISC is assisting in creating more flexible and responsive systems, policies, and business processes. Enterprise architectures, Sarah said, 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.

Dave van Gelder, Global Architect, Capgemini Nederland BV, next presented on "Business Analysis and Enterprise Architecture". The ongoing evolution of technology creates freedom in two ways, he said: opportunities for new value and innovation and freeing ourselves from current constraints. In this vein, Dave advocated for organizations to be able to have "processes on the fly" and obtain data whenever they want. Business analysts enter the picture because realizing the above-two flexibilities is not simple – it requires more than IT alone. A well-defined enterprise architecture must span IT as well as non-IT, and is able to act as a steward for implementation. Thus, he 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.

The day’s last plenary presentation, "Architecting the Sun", was given by Daniel Berg, Distinguished Engineer, CTO Global Sales & Services, and Vice President 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.

Kicking off the afternoon’s Professional Development Track was Paul Homan, IBM (UK), with "Leading Enterprise Architecture." Paul spoke within the context of his experiences leading enterprise architecture efforts as a chief architect. Most organizations, he said, regardless of their enterprise architecture situation, need leadership more than architecture. He then focused on the leadership and management aspects of running an enterprise architecture function, including softer skills like influencing and communicating.

In the TOGAF Track, Proteus Duxbury, Principal Consultant, PA Consulting Group (US), presented on "What Can TOGAF Learn from the Successes of the Medicaid Information Technology Architecture (MITA) Framework?" Proteus talked about how MITA, a US-based framework to support improved systems development and health care management for Medicaid, has goals and objectives that align well with those of TOGAF. Thus, the PA Consulting Group, he explained, has concluded that there are some areas of the TOGAF framework that can be strengthened with components of MITA; business architecture components in particular.

The SOA Track showcased a panel discussion on Business-Driven SOA, featuring Robert Laird, IBM (UK); Andreas Renk, Senior IT Architect, IBM (Germany); and Mario Biedermann, Wirtschaftsberatung Biedermann GbR (Germany). The discussion was moderated by Dr. Chris Harding, Forum Director for SOA and Semantic Interoperability at The Open Group. Panelists touched on the increasing need for articulating the business value of IT; business and IT alignment; and the danger of calculating an IT project based solely on profits and loss.

Later in the SOA Track, Martin Hromek, Principal Architect, DHL IT Services Europe (Czech Republic), presented on "SOA’s Role in Enterprise Architecture and Architecture Framework". He covered how SOA has great potential for improving IT throughput and business agility, and how services are central in a three-dimensional architecture framework. Organizations, Martin said, need incentives for building such shareable services. The middle-out approach, which takes advantage of the central position of services within architectural frameworks, is an effective way for implementing SOA as a pivotal part of an enterprise architecture.

Marlies van Steenbergen, Sogeti (Netherlands), closed out Day One’s TOGAF Track with her presentation "Successful Enterprise Architecture: Getting Stakeholder Involvement". Marlies advocated involving stakeholders in order to achieve unity surrounding developments within organizations. She also recommended distinguishing between various uses of architecture (strategic and operational), and also addressing each type of stakeholder (architects, management, suppliers, students), who have different concerns. Methods of stakeholder involvement include presentations, reviews, interviews, and workshops.