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Infosys have published the results of their Enterprise Architecture Survey 2007 which is always an interesting read.

 

The key findings..

• EA is emerging as a strategic tool at the corporate level, and moving outside the realm of IT
• EA is becoming more professional through the use of standardized, well-defined processes and tools;
• EA Governance, in particular its marketing and communications approach, needs to be improved.

 

The survey also shows that the key expectations from EA are business agility, IT-business alignment and portfolio simplification.

EA has gained acceptance as an important tool for corporate decision making. This is apparent from its role in strategic planning and its reporting lines. It is a key component of IT governance.

As EA recognizes its responsibility for objectives outside IT, business architecture becomes more important. However, application and technical architecture still prevail and continue to be key deliverables.

Marketing and communications is crucial when influencing a large organization; incidentally, this is not exactly the strength of many architects. The lack of a structured multi-channel communication strategy results in a serious awareness gap concerning the architecture vision.

The lack of appropriate metrics also makes it difficult to manage the IT assets of the organization as a portfolio. As most organizations do not penalize non-adherence to architecture, the architect’s task becomes a ‘battle against windmills’.

Our findings indicate that EA teams need to change. They need to strengthen their business level capabilities, build a consistent body of knowledge and the best practices of a mature profession, and improve their skills in influencing the organization.

 

Some of the highlights from the research for was the following findings:

 

EA Objectives and Benefits

The primary objective of enterprise architecture is business agility…

"Agility is the objective of the day – not just for IT, but for the entire organization. The most cited objective of EA is flexibility of business and processes to enable the enterprise to stay competitive."

 

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EA Focus Areas

 

"With agility and flexibility being the key objectives of EA, enterprise architects are focusing on service-orientation and integration. Close to 80% of the survey participants listed this area as critical” or “high” in terms of significance."

 

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EA Deliverables

 

"Even though EA teams are engaged in strategic planning efforts, a key expectation is to govern the enterprise technology landscape. Therefore, Enterprise Technology Standards, Technology Roadmaps and IT Strategy continue to be the three most common deliverables of EA teams."

 

 click for larger image 

 

EA Frameworks and Processes

Infosys analysed the adoption of three types of architecture frameworks:

• Generic Enterprise Architecture Frameworks, such as TOGAF, Zachman, FEAF and DODAF
• Industry frameworks such as eTOM, Acord, SAGA and CIMOSA
• Generic IT management frameworks such as ITIL and COBIT.

We found that framework adoption has increased significantly; with almost 70% using one or the other framework. Architecture frameworks have been adopted by 55% of the respondents’ organizations and almost all leverage industry standards. This is speedy progress compared to the 16% in our last survey.

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You can download the comprehensive Infosys 2007 Enterprise Architecture Survey here.

 

Technorati Tags: Research, EA,Enterprise Architecture, Architecture, Infosys, Strategy, 2007

The IEEE 1471:2000 standard defines architecture as:

"The fundamental organization of a system, embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and the environment, and the principles governing its design and evolution."

This definition of architecture is one of the most widely used in most of the literature I’ve read. This definition tries to capture what an architecture is, being "the fundamental organization of a system, embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and the environment". The definition does not describe what components one can expect to find in a architecture or how detailed the description  of the architecture should be. This definition does imply that an architecture as having a current-state and a future state and that the architecture evolves over time. Over and above having a current and future state, an architecture has principles that are used to govern architectural decisions and the architectures evolution.

This definition requires that good architecture has:

• A current state architecture
• A future state architecture
• A set of principles to guide the architecture’s evolution

 

Does your architecture have these three important components?

 

Technorati Tags: Architecture, Definition, IEEE, 1471,Principles, Enterprise Architecture, EA

Reference architectures are crucial tools that allow organisations to reduce the cost and time to implement technology solutions. In typical software projects a large amount of time is spent exploring technology options and assessing the appropriateness of solutions. This is where reference architecture provides the most value. As reference architectures are predefined and proven solutions to well described problems they can be confidently adopted by projects as part of their solution architecture, as illustrated in the figure below. These solutions can be quickly implemented by the organisation as they are based on previous implementation that are familiar to architects and developers.

Wikipedia defines a reference architecture as:

"…a proven template solution for an architecture for a particular domain. It also provides a common vocabulary with which to discuss implementations, often with the aim to stress commonality."

According to IBM’s RUP a reference architecture:

"…is, in essence, a predefined architectural pattern, or set of patterns, possibly partially or completely instantiated, designed, and proven for use in particular business and technical contexts, together with supporting artifacts to enable their use."

Considering the above definitions, a good reference architecture has the following characteristics:

• A repeatable solution: A reference architecture is a description of a solution that solves a specific recurring problem. It’s predefined by the organisation as an accepted approach to solving a specific problem within a domain. This allows the reference architecture to be used repeatedly, in numerous projects to solve similar problems.
• Proven: A reference architecture is a proven approach to solving the specific problem. By proven, we mean that is have been successfully used in previous projects and applications. Many of the reference architectures in use within the organisation have been recognised from successful implementations, documented for easy reuse.
• Descriptive: A reference architecture needs to be well described if it’s to be useful. The reference architecture need to assist with decision making by architects, project managers and developers. The reference architecture needs to describe what problem is solves, when it should be used and how it should used. It also should include standards that need to be implemented as part of the solution.

Well described reference architectures provide organisations with the following benefits:

• Provides a common domain-specific language for the various stakeholders
• Provide consistency of implementation of technology to solve problems
• Supports the validation of solutions against proved reference architectures
• Supports enterprise architecture and IT governance.
• Encourages adherence to common standards and patterns
• Encourages adoption of common asset reuse approaches

 

Are your solution architectures supported by proven reference architectures? How much reuse are you getting from your architectural efforts? What reference architecture should you be developing considering your enterprise application roadmap?

 

Technorati Tags: Reference Architecture,Architecture,Enterprise Architecture,EA,Project

Joe McKendrick wrote an interesting post titled "What the statistics are telling us about SOA" highlighting the numerous surveys and studies around SOA adoption conducted over the last year. Here are the highlights from this year’s studies of SOA:

• 57% of executives expect to see cost reductions as a result of SOA, while 27% cite code reuse and 23% expect to increase business agility. (Saugatuck)
• 50% of new mission-critical operational applications and business processes were designed this year around SOA, a number will jump to more than 80 percent by 2010. (Gartner)
• 40% of companies with SOA spend between 10 and 30 percent of their overall IT budgets on SOA projects. Most have increased their SOA budgets over last year. (IBM)
• 48% of CIOs are planned to open their SOAs “to the cloud” in 2007 — the cloud being “where their current and potential trading partners are.” (McKinsey)
• 37% of companies implementing SOA report seeing positive return on investment from SOA — which, by the way, isn’t too shabby (Nucleus Research)
• 29% of companies with advanced SOA deployments are using SOA governance software, compared of 17% of companies still in earlier stages of SOA. (Aberdeen)
• 61% of advanced SOA deployers saw a reduction in the number of software defects discovered in production, compared to 18% of non-deploying companies could say they were able to reduce defects. (Aberdeen)
• 49% of developers working with SOA say they can now complete a typical SOA project within three months – more than twice as many as a year ago. Plus, more than 60% of all SOA projects are now developed and deployed within just six months. (Evans Data)
• 75% of mainframe users said they want to modernize their systems. But 52%, also said they had concerns about their system’s ability to actually support SOA. (Software AG)
• 25% of mainframe companies have SOA efforts now in progress, and another one-third are planning or considering SOA. At least half say they are or will employ mainframes in a central role in SOA. (Unisphere Research/SHARE)
• 55% of executives view SOA as “the best way to support the use of social networking and Web 2.0 development techniques in their IT infrastructure.” (BEA)
• 56% of executives at companies deploying SOA admit that at least half of the code or artifacts developed under their roofs are not reviewed for compliance before moving into production. (SOA Forum)
• 15% of small companies (with fewer than 100 employees) have SOA efforts underway, compared to 35% of companies with more than 500 employees. (Nucleus Research)
• 12% — that’s the average growth rate of companies with “well-aligned IT-business operations,” versus 4% overall. (BTM Institute)

 

Some interesting reading…

 

Technorati Tags: SOA,Service Orientated Architecture,EA,Architecture,Software,Research

The 2008 "State of the CIO" study is highlighted in the article "Information Technology Budgets: Which Industry Spends the Most?" provides some useful statistics on spending by industry.  The 2008 State of the CIO asked IT leaders about their budgets, and how many users they have per IT employee.
 

Industry	IT Budget as a Percent of Revenue	Users per IT Staffer
Financial Services	10.5	15.7
Government	7.8	37.8
Employee/former employee	6.2	48.3
Health Care	5.0	25.4
Wholesale and Retail	3.9	47.5
Manufacturing	3.4	40.9
Overall Sample	6.7	35.1

SOURCE: 2008 "State of the CIO" survey of 558 heads of IT. NOTE: Survey respondents in financial services, government, health care and wholesale/retail industries said they expect to be hiring IT staff in the next 12 months.

How does your organisation’s IT spending stack-up?

 

Technorati Tags: Spending,IT,Strategy,Management,Cost,Benchmark,Finance

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