Open Group Enterprise Architecture Conference 2008 - Day 2

First, a big thanks to everyone that attended my session yesterday. It was a great crowd, even though I was the last presentation of the first day and was the only thing between the audience and the evening entertainment. So thank you for your attention and great questions afterwards. Additionally, thanks to David Linthicum on the "Plug" to my blog on his site. It's good to sync up with like minded architects.

Points of Note in Day 2

Keynote Overview

1. There were two keynotes that real stood out. The first was more comedic  but provided some real good content. He made a funny "EA Jeopardy" parody.

2. The second was from CGI. This session was one of the best of the day. He was able to clearly identify the close relationships between EA practices.

3. There was a roundtable again today as well and this was very valuable. It has validated thoughts and also generated some new ones.

Advancements and Lessons of TOGAF Implementation

1. Robert walk us through how enterprise processes are related to established industry standardized processes.

1. This model really shows us how TOGAF is technology independent

2. What is interesting here is that this is very similar to the Microsoft Operations Framework wheel. See below:

1. He walked through a matrix of architect skills that has mappings to career paths, required skills and clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Keep an eye out for his presentation if OpenGroup publishes it.

2. One thing that isn't commonly understood is that TOGAF is a generic architecture framework that defines the "How" (at the process level define how to apply the information that you gathered by providing a reusable process) rather than the "What" (the right questions to ask with a matrix style data capture). We have a lot of frameworks define the "What" such as: Zachman, DoDAF, TEAF, FEAF, etc.

TOGAF Customer Roundtable

1. John Bell from Marriott and Chris Forde from American Express are both Enterprise Architects that walk through some of their challenges and how they address them in their organization.

2. I'm not going to go through the entire conversation as some of it I have already talked about on my blog.

3. What stands out for me out of the conversation is the very big differences between the EA models between American Express and Marriott.

4. This is a common question. I get this a lot from within Microsoft. It usually starts something like this: "Mike, EA is broken... There isn't even a constant way to do it. Look at X and Y company they have separate operation models and execution models"

5. I would assert that this is actually a very good thing. This came out indirectly in the session today

1. As you see above I would say that the majority of the EA organizations use very similar base process and methods, however.... They execute on those core EA capabilities in a way that is appropriate for their business.

2. For example: A Bank has specific constraints and business concerns. So for EA's in the Banking space Risk management will be a critical pivot point in the decision making processes.

3. For a Manufacturing company the higher order bit is agility

4. For a software company like Microsoft, enabling and fostering innovation is a key concern for EA's.

   1. These companies could have the same technology problems but how these architectures are orchestrated are different entirely. This is very similar to the examples given in the Jean Ross book where she compares FedEx vs. UPS and shows how the business has dramatic effects on what the technology implementation looks like. This is the same for non-technology aspects such as governance and process.

5. I mentioned validation earlier and that is in terms that I am still in touch with the ongoing issues in the EA space. Some of the continuous challenges that EA's are facing:

6. Organizational Challenges - It's still about the people rather than the technology

7. Application Portfolio Mgmt - There has been a great deal of discussion both directly and indirectly. There seems to be a surge of people ramping up this activity.

8. Building EA Organizations and Solution Architectures - There is a great deal of success by starting small and iterating to the future state. This is similar to my talk on SOA about the "Middle Out Approach" an SOA approach that supports this concept.

Afternoon Sessions

There are some great customer case studies in the afternoon from the Automotive industry, Canadian Government and Micron. These were some great session to see past the theory and into the practice. I may provide some additional information on these at a later time.