Update / Election of Officers
John Spencer, Director of the Architecture Forum, gave an update on the forum, in which
he announced the re-election of the Chair and Vice Chairs:
- Chair:
- Chris Greenslade, Frietuna Computer Consultants (UK)
- Vice Chairs:
- Barry Smith, The MITRE Corporation (USA)
- Ian McCall, IBM Global Services (UK)
- Vish Viswanathan, CC & C Solutions (Australia)
There having been no prior nominations for the position, Bill Schmidt of MITRE
Corporation was elected as the Forum's representative to The Open Group Customer Council.
Russ Richards of DISA, the outgoing representative, agreed to act as alternate.
John then went on to give an update on membership, and on downloads of the newly
published TOGAF 8 "Enterprise Edition", which showed an increase of 250% over
the downloads of TOGAF Version 7 at the same time the previous year..
TOGAF and OMG's Model Driven Architecture (MDA)
Allan Kennedy of Kennedy Carter Limited lead a discussion on the work to date on this
joint project, and the immediate goals. There was a very lively discussion, in which the
principle of co-operation and synergy between MDA and TOGAF was warmly welcomed by the
members of the Architecture Forum.
TOGAF AND MDA: A Unifying Theme:
- TOGAF, and particularly the ADM, exposes and/or generates a considerable quantity of
knowledge about the actual and planned architecture (at all four levels) of a system or
system of systems
- MDA provides a set of languages for formalising that knowledge as stakeholder-friendly
models that can be verified for correctness...
- …and that can be leveraged to automate the production of downstream deliverables.
TOGAF and DSDM - Next Steps
David Harrison of Popkin Software gave an update on the outcome of the joint DSDM
Consortium and Open Group Partnership Workshop, held on 23rd January in Reading, UK.
The output had been a detailed Vision Statement, which both the Architecture Forum and
the Board of the DSDM Consortium were considering separately on the same day.
The Architecture Forum endorsed the findings of the workshop, and awaits the outcome of
the deliberations of the Board of the DSDM Consortium.
IT Architect Certification
David Jackson of IBM reviewed the status of this project, which represents one of the
three core elements of the Architecture Forum's overall vision and strategy (an effective
IT Architecture framework, an effective IT Architecture discipline, effective IT
Architecture tools).
The project aims to develop a definition of IT Architect roles, skills and experience,
and a supporting certification program, in collaboration with other key consortia and
standards bodies.
TOGAF and Common System Architectures
Ian McCall of IBM, the European Vice-Chair of the Architecture Forum, presented his
thoughts on moving towards a practical realization of the TOGAF Enterprise Continuum
concept, by identifying and defining suitable “common system architectures”.
Ian's presentation was welcomed as a very useful crystallization of ideas in this
field. It was agreed to consider Ian's ideas in conjunction with those of Terry Blevins
for further elaboration of the Integrated Information Infrastructure Reference Model
(III-RM), in support of the Boundaryless Information Flow vision (see below).
The Eclipse Open Source Architecture Toolkit
David Jackson and Sridhar Iyengar of IBM gave separate presentations on IBM's Eclipse
Open Source Architecture Toolkit and its potential relevance to TOGAF and the Architecture
Forum.
Both presentations, and a recording of the ensuing discussion, are available on the Architecture Forum members' web
site.
Open Source and TOGAF
Walter Stahlecker and Chris Greenslade lead a discussion of the output from the open
source session on the Tuesday of the Member's Conference. In that session, it had been
mooted that open source in the enterprise could be a niche in which The Open Group might
be able to add value. The business case was seen as a key factor. Stormy Peters –
open source manager for HP – had presented on open source best practices.
It was agreed that Architecture Forum members would review open source community
material, and propose contributions to TOGAF.
Chief Architects Forum
Terry Blevins, CIO of The Open Group, lead a discussion on the concept of a Chief
Architects Forum, to be run in parallel with the Architecture Forum.
Terry's original paper on this topic, and the discussion in the workshop, are available
on the members' web site.
Boundaryless Information Flow
Terry Blevins, CIO of The Open Group, lead a discussion leading on from his and Eliot
Solomon's presentation on this topic during the plenary of the Members' Conference earlier
in the week.
This is an important topic: the Boundaryless Information Flow vision is co-ordinating
The Open Group’s forums / activities to a common goal. It was agreed that the
Architecture Forum needs to give other forums guidance on how to represent Common Systems
Architectures, via a new section in TOGAF describing common systems architectures
(“Common system architecture patterns”?).
Ian McCall of IBM agreed to lead the work to establish how to publish guidelines on
common systems architectures.
Wrap-Up / Work Planning
Architecture Forum Work Plan
The Architecture Forum members present reviewed the detailed Forum work plan that been
routed for review by John Spencer ahead of the meeting. Specific work assignments were
agreed during the meeting. The plan will now be updated, and the updated version
made available for a sanity check review by Forum members before being published on the
Architecture Forum's public web site.
Planning for next Members' Meeting in Austin, TX
An outline agenda for the next meeting in Austin was agreed.
TOGAF Life-Cycle
There was a preliminary discussion on the topic of the TOGAF publication life-cycle, in
view of the existence of two current Versions of TOGAF (7 and 8) and the introduction of
TOGAF certification (based on TOGAF 7).
