Day Two of The Open Group Boston Conference began with a warm Open Group welcome from Allen Brown, President & CEO, The Open Group, welcoming attendees to the first day of the Enterprise Architecture portion of the conference. He mentioned some of the highlights of the previous day, including the success of the first ever TOGAF™ camp the previous evening. He also discussed some of The Open Group’s recent successes, including the addition of 19 new members in the past quarter and the establishment of five new chapters of the Association of Open Group Enterprise Architects in Chicago, Colombia, Mumbai, Peru, and Ohio. Allen also mentioned that this is the first conference where The Open Group has done simultaneous translation during the proceedings, with translation being done in Chinese during the plenary sessions this morning.
Kicking off the morning plenary session was the keynote by Dr. Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist, MIT Center for Information Systems Research. Jeanne addressed the issue of Evolving EA from IT to the Business. According to Jeanne, architecture is fundamentally about the need for businesses to be agile. She defined agility as the use of processes to affect quick change while limiting costs and risks. She explained that the ultimate goal of architecture is to design organizations to be more effective and competitive.
In her talk, Jeanne addressed four key research findings that outline the journey from IT to the business. The first finding is that organizations must realize that because architecture has been traditionally housed in the IT department, the evolution of taking it to the business level will be a journey. Second, she stressed that architecture is a business-wide priority that needs firm commitment throughout the organization. This includes examining the entire scope of IT within the business and what processes should be done in-house versus outsourced. It also involves being distinctive about what processes are digitized, making actionable assessments, being strategic in choices about the business, and working smarter by creating better processes.
The third step in the journey is to take a long-term view. This is the point at which the discipline becomes more of an art than science, requiring creative thinking and planning. In the fourth step, the journey involves a major business transformation for the entire organization. She also outlined four stages that organizations much go through to make IT more strategic, which include breaking down business silos, moving to standardized technologies, optimizing the core business processes and establishing guiding principles, then finally moving to a long-term vision where the business is modular. To illustrate the journey of architecture,Jeanne provided case study examples from 7-Eleven Japan, Toyota Europe, and Campbell’s Soup.
Takeaways from the session included four key lessons for architects to keep in mind:
- Business architecture is not separate from technology or data; it’s the over-arching logic.
- Outcomes should be the focus of any architecture.
- EA is everyone’s responsibility, not just architects'.
- If there are no business metrics, there is no business architecture—efforts must deliver value for it to matter.
The second session of the morning plenary featured Hamidou Dia, Senior Director, Enterprise Architecture, Oracle. Hamidou spoke on the topic of Building Sustainable Architectures for Business Success. Sustainable architecture is a way for organizations to meet today’s needs for efficiency, re-usability, flexibility, and durability without compromising the future. According to Hamidou, the top business goals of EA are to offer businesses ways to grow and manage M&A activity, adapt, innovate, and reduce costs. In addition to these goals, architects are faced with a number of trends and challenges, including social networking and enterprise 2.0 technologies, cloud computing, and constantly evolving hardware and software systems. EA sits at the intersection of these challenges and goals, helping organizations to drive greater efficiency.
To create a sustainable architecture, Oracle uses a number of guiding principles which include: using business strategy to drive the architecture; focusing on building an architectural vision; re-using best practice business models and reference architectures; practicing just enough, just in time; making things iterative and collaborative; and ensuring enforcement. To succeed, people, processes, and a portfolio are critical for fulfilling the architecture vision. He suggested that organizations put together an architecture vision for sustainability that encompasses 10-12 rules to follow. Architects should also develop a strategic roadmap for that vision and then put together a governance model to assess the project. Finally, he provided a case study of how Oracle tackles their own EA strategy, which is focused around four main principles: operational excellence, better information and governance; strategic agility; and improving customer intimacy.
After a brief morning coffee break, the final morning plenary session was led by Mary Tolbert, Lead Enterprise Architect for the US Air Force Combat Information Transport System, MITRE. Mary tackled the topic of using TOGAF™ and DoDAF together in her address entitled: TOGAF™ 9 and the US Department of Defense Architecture Framework 2.0 (DoDAF 2.0). Mary, who was celebrating her birthday today, gave a practical discussion on how to integrate the two frameworks. DoDAF (the Department of Defense Architecture Framework) 2.0 was introduced last year. As an architecture framework, DoDAF 2.0 designs a set of elements and regulations organized into viewpoints and models and doesn’t require any particular methodology for architecture development, lending it to complementary use with other frameworks. The latest version of DoDAF introduced a number of new viewpoints to the framework including viewpoints for capability, operations, services, and systems, data and information, standards. DoDAF viewpoints can be mapped and tailored to the TOGAF ADM, aligning each with different phases of the ADM to create a complementary architecture. She walked through the process of how MITRE mapped the DoDAF 2.0 viewpoints to the ADM, providing detailed explanations on how to implement each part of the model. Using TOGAF 9 and DoDAF 2.0 together, companies can create a customized framework to produce architecture descriptions with well-defined and repeatable processes.
Afternoon sessions on Tuesday consisted of four separate tracks:
- Professionalizing the Discipline of EA (hosted by Rolf Siegers, Raytheon)
- SOA Tutorials (hosted by Awel Dico, Bank of Montreal and Heather Kreger, IBM)
- Ecosystem of Architecture (hosted by Walter Stahlecker, The Open Group)
- Security (hosted by Mike Jerbic, Trusted Systems Consulting)
In the Professionalizing the Discipline of EA track, Savi Sharma, CD&EA-Architecture Practice for Nike, began the careers discussion by addressing an Approach to Design EA Practice to Support Architects throughout the EA Job Lifecycle. Savi discussed how Nike supports its EA practice and how the practice fits into the organization. The vision for their practice is to provide a well understood and managed architecture landscape that addresses Nike’s current needs and supports the growth of the company. Strategic goals for the practice include growing their architects, enabling community maturity, facilitating clear direction for their architecture, and creating a standardized approach to architecture. Nike supports its architects by providing a number of tools to empower them for success. These begin with the hiring process, a process that has been templatized so that there is consistency in hiring. Next, new employees receive a thorough orientation of the department and personal goals after new employees are hired. Since most architects spend the majority of their time at Nike in Continued Career Development, specific processes and templates have been set up for employees so that they can receive ongoing feedback and guidance as they develop in their roles as architects at the company. Another way the department serves employees is to host forums and deep-dive sessions for technical specialists, analyst groups, business partners, etc. to help provide additional perspective on what the department should work on. Architects also receive the opportunity to present their work at the forums. By building a learning environment that allows everyone to collaborate, understand the big picture, and work across departments, the company ensures that its architects can move up the ladder with the skills and capabilities they need.
In the Ecosystem of Architecture track, William Shelag, Managing Consultant for Deloitte Consulting, spoke on the topic of Transforming EA into a Business Discipline. William's presentation focused on the idea: “What should be the purpose of an architecture?”. According to William, there is currently a large disconnect between strategic IT plans, overall business strategies, and strategy execution in most organizations. Because most organizations fail to execute strategies well, making strategies work is often much more difficult than creating the strategy in the first place. Part of what makes strategies difficult to carry out is that they require considerable coordination and communications; they occur over a period of time; they usually require change, overcoming inertia and new skills and competencies; and they require measurement and metrics. He suggested that to make strategies work takes six key elements: considering implementation issues; making the strategy clear and unambiguous; translating long-term needs; addressing communications and integration requirements; focusing on people; and following a unifying integrative approach. Enterprise architecture can support business strategies by helping organizations understand where they currently are; serve as translators for strategies; help define information necessary for change, and providing an integrated approach.
After the afternoon break, the Security track resumed with Marlin Pohlman, Chief Governance Officer/Chair, EMC and Co-Chair of the Cloud Security Alliance Control Matrix. Martin led a discussion entitled Use of the Cloud Security Alliance Control Matrix to Support IT Governance. The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) has created a Control Matrix that provides guidance for cloud security and also aligns to Jericho Forum®, SABSA, ITIL v3, and other frameworks. According to Martin, cloud infrastructures pose a number of security challenges, thus the CSA has put together both a cloud guidance framework and the Cloud Matrix. The Cloud Matrix is an ontology that provides guidance to cloud vendors and assists prospective cloud customers in assessing the overall security risk of a cloud provider. The Matrix currently includes 11 control groups and 98 controls that map to assessments, audits, and matrix work groups. The Matrix is intended to be a foundation for measuring, reporting, and auditing performance. It is also loosely coupled to the guidance and is measurable, executable, and auditable.
Closing out the day in the SOA Tutorials track was a panel discussion entitled Real-World Experience with SOA – Benefits Gained, Lessons Learned. Chaired by Brenda Michelson, Business Technology Advisor, Elemental Links, the panel included Awel Dico, Enterprise Architect, Bank of Montreal; Mark Sternberger, Integrated Defense Systems enterprise (IDS), Innovation, Strategy, and Architecture Function (ISA), Raytheon; and Chris McCarthy, Senior Vice President and Lead Architect for Investor Services, State Street Corporation.
Each panelist took approximately 10 minutes to discuss their own use-case stories. Mark Sternberger began by describing how Raytheon has worked to integrate BPM into their architectures and SOA practice. He also advocated using a capabilities map based on business processes as a framework to give the business and IT a way to accomplish business/technology convergence. Chris McCarthy talked about how State Street is using web services for their application support throughout the business and the benefits the company has received. Lastly, Awel Dico provided some highlights on the programs being used by the Bank of Montreal, and how they’ve used web services to do implementations across channels as well as provide ways to re-use some of the architecture. Branda Michelson then asked the panel what lessons they have learned that they could pass along to other practitioners. Mark Sternberger said that practices must be set up to have an evolutionary approach, and that practitioners should realize that SOA is a journey. Chris McCarthy added that companies need to be aware of having the correct infrastructure and making sure that governance is part of the planning stage. Awel Dico concluded by mentioning that his company was challenged to figure out how to take advantage of re-use. He also mentioned that documentation and guidelines are essential for an iterative approach.
Don’t forget to join The Open Group’s social media network and get the inside scoop on Open Group milestones
related to various standards and certification initiatives, thought
leadership webinars, conferences, and regional networking events.
