The CCOP Objective is to foster a community that allows individuals and organizations passionate about collaboration to: - share their vision, knowledge and expertise in: standards, best practices, collaboration tools, techniques and principles - learn from the knowledge and experience of others - facilitate the adoption or creation of best of breed standards and best practices in collaboration - facilitate market adoption activities to promote the use of those collaboration standards and best practices
Enterprise architecture is a management practice that was initially developed within the IT discipline to manage the complexity of IT systems, as well as the ongoing change constantly triggered by business and technology developments.
Today, one of the primary reasons EA is adopted in organizations worldwide is to promote alignment between business requirements and IT solutions. EA is expanding into other business disciplines, as well: to enable business strategy development, improve business efficiency, facilitate knowledge management and assist with organizational learning, to name a few.
In order to effectively implement EA in organizations, architects are increasingly looking for best practices and frameworks to assist them. One of the few architecture frameworks publicly available to guide architects in their implementation is TOGAF. Put simply, TOGAF is a comprehensive toolset for assisting in the acceptance, production, use and maintenance of enterprise architectures. It is based on an iterative process model supported by best practices and a reusable set of existing architectural assets. Since it was developed by members of The Open Group Architecture Forum more than 10 years ago, TOGAF has emerged as arguably the de facto standard framework for delivering enterprise architecture.
One common problem I see in the IT industry is the qualification of IT decisions. I talk to architects from all around the world and hear a lot of creative and innovate ways of solving problems. More often than not, what I don’t hear is more concerning. When I have asked: Why did we approach the problem in this manner? How does this align to the business? Does this fulfill the business, functional and non-functional requirements Why is this the optimal architecture? Obviously there are a lot of other questions, but to keep this concise above are some sample questions. The last question is particularly interesting. I have heard a broad range of fluffy answers such as: “trust me, I know what I am doing”, “I have been doing this for 20 years, I know how to do this”, “I am the expert of [X]”. All of these responses may be completely true but doesn’t quantify the solution. It doesn’t demonstrate that there was a process or a clear level of due diligence that was performed.