The Open Group Conference, Munich
20th Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference

Highlights of the Plenary, Day 3
(Wednesday October 22)

Day Three consisted of a number of small breakout sessions within tracks focusing on topics such as Professional Development, EA Best Practices, SOA and Identity Management, TOGAF, EA & Business Architecture, SOA and EA, and EA & Business Value.

An Enterprise Architecture Survey was conducted by The Open Group following each session of the SOA track. The results are available here.

In the Professional Development track, Sheila Thorne, Worldwide IT Specialist Profession Leader for IBM began the day with a session on “Speed Mentoring”. According to Sheila, the role of a mentor is to serve as a trusted counselor. For those seeking mentors, the best way to begin is to identify and assess your own goals prior to seeking a mentor. Self-assessment starts with identifying your strengths and weaknesses, defining your likes and dislikes, and evaluating your tolerance for risk. From there you need to define short- and long-term goals, as well as your interests and what you want to do. Most importantly, you need to tell people what your interests are so they can help you bring them to fruition. It’s also useful to identify the internal barriers you have that stop you from doing what you want because those things are usually what you need to work on to reach your goals. Once you’ve identified these things about yourself, then it’s easier to connect to mentors and ask people for advice. Discussion afterward centered on how to build professional development within The Open Group and also how to attract more young professionals and women, both to conferences and also to help develop and grow careers for young professionals.

In the SOA and Identity Management track, Stuart Boardman, Director of Consulting, CGI of the Netherlands presented on “A Service Oriented Approach to User Provisioning – Unexpected Architectural Challenges”. Over time, user provisioning has become increasingly complex. It is no longer sufficient to just use names, user IDs, passwords, and addresses to identify users. Demands on provisioning have expanded the definition of what provisioning should be, what it should include, and how it should be done, now with specific technologies dedicated solely to provisioning. The concept of identity has also expanded to move well beyond just names, but also to include personalized content that builds “identities” for users. From an architectural perspective, it is important to make decisions about this sort of information, how it is used, and where it belongs within the infrastructure, as well as whether provisioning can affect it. Key takeaways included: the fact that there is a problem to be solved, but no silver bullet for it; that the problem is manageable; it is possible to separate identity from provisioning; it must be accepted that some information can be mastered outside core business systems even from other providers; and that working with identity providers can help to build a sense of trust.

Rajaram Venkataramani, Technology Consulting Group, Banking & Financial Services, Cognizant UK presented a session called “Enterprise Architecture Consultancy in Practice” in the EA Best Practices track. Rajaram posed the question: “Why consultants for EA?”. According to him, using consultants for enterprise architecture is helpful because they have strong domain knowledge, low bandwidth in customer organizations, and consultants can bring new perspectives on methodologies in part due to exposure they have to other customers. Companies may need to outsource enterprise architecture for a number of reasons — for transition and transformation planning, to align solution architectures to the enterprise architecture vision, to assess the internal application and infrastructure, and to receive help choosing a technology stack. Rajaram stepped through a few case studies to provide examples of how a consultancy can be used to help companies define their problems and come up with concrete examples of how to approach and solve their problems; perform governance modeling; define architectures for companies; build frameworks for managing specific operations, such as trade operations; and modernize legacy applications. When approaching architecture, consultancies should always go through a process of diagnostics, definition, and planning and they should learn to understand the organization’s stakeholders, problems, and the scope of the project in order to build a solution and demonstrate their effectiveness.

Back in the Professional Development track, James de Raeve, VP Certification, The Open Group hosted an “IT Architect Certification Q&A” session. Discussion centered on how to assess one’s preparedness for certification and the certification process.  ITAC Certification is based on completing a certification package that then goes through an internal review followed by the candidate going through an extensive interviewing process. Benefits of certification can include obtaining external validation for one’s work experience, career advancement, etc.. The group also discussed what the criteria mean for outside organizations in terms of competency and why the Board chose to certify by interview rather than by examination. Success rates for those who have reached the interview process are approximately 80% for those who have applied for certification directly through The Open Group.

In the afternoon session SOA and EA track, Andreas Freitag, Consultant, Detecon International, Germany began the session with a case study entitled “Drive SOA Migration Roadmap through Financial Parameters”. Andreas’ premise was that using financial parameters for architecture is extremely helpful in gaining organizational buy-in for projects. Using an implementation case study that outlined a CRM project at Deutsche Telekom, he pointed out that the project team was both cross-divisional and inter-disciplinary, including representatives from IT, business, controller, and enterprise architecture as primary stakeholders. Throughout the entire planning and project implementation processes, financial views were considered as part of the common language used among all the project stakeholders. Using an enterprise architecture taxonomy was integral in getting the different departments to communicate and understand each other during the process. By allocating and mapping costs and using benchmarks for the projects, they were also able to create financial valuations for target scenarios and decision preparation, including implementation costs and potential savings. Andreas believes that using financial architectures will become increasingly important for enterprise architecture projects in the future. Implementing an adequate enterprise architecture controlling model can therefore be the precursor to unleashing the potential of SOA throughout the enterprise. Resulting discussion showed that it can often be difficult to determine costs internally as opposed to a project being conducted by a consultancy.

Maarten Waag, Senior Enterprise Architect, Capgemini, Netherlands presented on the “Value of Business Architecture for the Dutch Immigration Agency” during the afternoon EA & Business Architecture track. Maarten presented a government case study on work he has done for the Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Department (IND) over the past two years. The organization has 3000 employees, 15 locations, and receives approximately 400,000 applications for entry into the country per year. The objective of the project was to transform the IND to become an organization that was more effective, efficient, and customer-oriented. The architecture objective was to become clearer on the organization’s goals, and the project was focused on creating a business architecture rather than an IT architecture. After beginning the project, it was discovered that in addition to the three objectives IND initially defined, they also needed to focus on agility. To create better customer service, the agency needed to get rid of information silos, segment and apply a multi-channel strategy to their customer base, and have better communications with other agencies within the country. Based on the mission, vision, and strategy, IND also had to standardize and simplify their internal processes, as well as implement some process control within the organization. After putting together the business architecture for the IND, they were able to apply many of the same principles to IND’s information systems, as well. In the end, the business architecture served as an instrument for informed governance that allowed IND to identify and make the decisions needed to change their organization.

Later in the SOA track, Arnold van Overeem, Global Architect, Capgemini, Netherlands presented a case study entitled “Identity Management Interoperability in the European Union”. This track focused on the interoperability of identities within the European Union (EU). The EU consists of 27 member states, 23 official languages, 27 legal frameworks, and approximately 500 million inhabitants. Each member state has various government agencies with legacy systems that need to communicate with each other both within and between country lines making interoperability a difficult task. Currently electronic IDs (eIDs) are a hot issue within the EU because the states would like to implement an EU-wide system that would allow citizens and government employees to use eIDs in every member state. One problem in implementing the eID program is that existing legislation may prevent a mapping of registration requirements that would allow adequate trust levels to be determined. Another problem is that different countries have different concepts of identity: some countries believe that identity should be owned by the individual, others believe it should be owned by the state — thus creating difficulties for citizens who have dealings with states on both sides of the argument. Because Europe is so heavily divided on the concept of identity, better consensus on the term is needed in order to make eIDs a feasible reality. Maarten Waage believes that without a successful business architecture, the eID program will not be successful.

In the final EA Development track of the day, Thomas Obitz, Principal Architect, Strategic Technology & Architecture Consulting, Infosys Technologies, Germany presented the “Key Results of the Enterprise Architecture Survey 2008”. Infosys does an annual survey of Enterprise Architects and how they are conducting enterprise architecture. The company asked 173 enterprise architects and IT decision-makers across industries about their used of enterprise architecture. Most companies surveyed identified business-IT alignment, process improvement, and flexibility as the top aims for enterprise architecture. According to those surveyed, the top reason for using enterprise architecture is as a tool for organizational change. The survey also found that enterprise architects are becoming accepted advisors within businesses and that most organizations have full-time enterprise architecture functions. Key statistical highlights from the survey include:

• 43% of enterprise architecture teams play an active role in strategic business planning
• 59% of enterprise architects have their own discretionary budgets
• Enterprise architects spend the majority of their time on the following activities: information 26%; application architecture 25%; business 16%; and integration 16%
• 71% reported IT strategy is their most important deliverable
• Enterprise architects rated integration (67%), SOA (67%), and security and identity management (58%) as either a critical or high focus
• TOGAF™ is the most widely adopted enterprise architecture framework with 32% of those surveyed using it
• 71% of organizations customize frameworks for their own needs

Finally, justifying enterprise architecture continues to be a challenge – only 61% of all enterprise architecture teams claim they can justify their enterprise architecture investment, but metrics could be used to help justify those investments.

In AOGEA news, The Open Group is pleased to announce that the first European chapter of the Association of Open Group Enterprise Architects was launched this week here at the Munich conference. The Central Germany chapter launched at the conference on Monday, holding their first meeting on Monday evening. Twenty members were in attendance and officers were elected for the chapter. The founder for the Central Germany chapter is Mark Oliver and the chapter will be based in Ludwigshafen, Germany. For more information on the Central Germany chapter, please go to: https://www.aogea.org/membership/ViewChapter?id=100009.