Confusion about Services Based Architectures [SBA, SOA, EDA, ...] has been created by a number of industry elements. Industry critics like Forrester first used the term Services Based Architecture until 2000 when Gartner came up with their own term Services Oriented Architectures (SOA). Forrester was still using the term SBA in 2002. Gartner next created the term Event Driven Architecture and has now come full circle back to SOA 2.0 (supporting both SOA and EDA like the original SBA).
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.
In the book The Art of War for Executives, Donald G. Krause interprets the following: “Sun Tsu notes, superior commanders succeed in situations where ordinary people fail because they obtain more timely information and use it more quickly.” For metadata professionals, this observation is increasingly relevant as more and more of the business seeks integration and federation, alignment with business goals and strategies, and agility - the ability to respond both quickly and accurately to change. Industry analysts and IT professionals are less focused on solutions to problems where metadata management plays a role but rather look more to metadata management as an overall strategy for the benefits it provides to multiple aspects of the whole organization.
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.
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