Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast with Guillaume Nodet and Adrian Trenaman of Progress Software on directions and trends in SOA and open source infrastructure.
Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: Progress Software.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect. Today, a sponsored podcast discussion about open source, service-oriented architecture (SOA) developments, and trends.
We are going to catch up and get a refresher on some important open-source software projects in the Apache Software Foundation. We’ll be looking at the Apache ServiceMix enterprise service bus (ESB), and the toolkit, and we are going to talk with some thought leaders and community development leaders to assess the market for these products, particularly in the context of cloud computing, which is certainly getting a lot of attention these days.
We'll also look at the context around such technologies as OSGi and Java Business Integration (JBI). We want to also think about what this means for enterprise-caliber SOA, particularly leveraging open-source projects. [Access more FUSE Community podcasts.]
To help us sort out and better understand the open-source SOA landscape, we’re joined by Guillaume Nodet, software architect at Progress Software and vice president of Apache ServiceMix at Apache. Welcome to the show, Guillaume.
Guillaume Nodet: Thank you.
Gardner: We are also joined by Adrian Trenaman, distinguished consultant at Progress Software. Hey, Adrian.
Adrian Trenaman: Hey, Dana. How is it going?
Gardner: Good. Now, we are starting to see different patterns of adoption and use-case scenarios around SOA, and open-source projects. Counterpart offerings for certification and support, such as the FUSE offerings from Progress, are getting more traction in interesting ways. The role of ESBs, I think as we can safely say, it is expanding.
The role for management and policy and rules and roles is becoming much more essential, not on a case-by-case basis or tactical basis, but more from a holistic management overview of services and other aspects of IT development and deployment.
First I want to go to Guillaume. Give us a quick update on Apache ServiceMix, and how you see it being used in the market now?
Nodet: Apache ServiceMix is one of the top-level projects at the Apache Software Foundation. It was started back in 2005, and was graduated as a top-level project a year-and-a-half ago. ServiceMix is an open-source ESB and it's really a well-known ESB for several reasons, which we’ll come to later. It's really a full-featured ESB that is widely used in a whole range of companies from government to banking applications. There’s very wide use of ServiceMix.
Gardner: Tell us a little bit about your background, and how you became involved. How long have you been working on ServiceMix, and what led you up to getting involved?
Nodet: Back in 2004, I was working at a small company based in France, and we were looking for an ESB for internal purposes. I began to do some research on the open-source ESBs available at that time. I was involved in the Mule Project and I became a committer in my spare time, and had been one of the main committers for six months.
In the summer of 2005, my company was firing people for economical reasons, and I decided to take a break and leave the company. So I sent an email to James Strachan, who was just starting ServiceMix, and that's how I became involved. I was hired by LogicBlaze at the time, which has been acquired by IONA and now Progress.
Gardner: Tell us a little bit more about the context of the ServiceMix ESB in some of the other Apache Software Foundation projects, just so our listeners understand that this isn't necessarily standalone. It can be used, of course, standalone, but it fits into a bigger picture, when it comes to SOA infrastructure. Maybe you could just explain that landscape as it stands now.
The bigger picture
Nodet: ServiceMix is an ESB and reuses lots of other Apache projects. The main ones which ServiceMix reuse is Apache ActiveMQ which is a message broker so it is for the JMS backbone infrastructure. We also heavily use Apache CXF, which is a SOAP stack that integrates nicely in ServiceMix. One of the other projects that we use is Apache Camel, which is a sub-project of Apache ActiveMQ, is a message router, which is really efficient and it uses DSL to be able to configure routers very easily. So these are the three main projects that we use.
Of course, for ServiceMix 4.0, we are also using the Apache Felix OSGi Framework, and lots of other projects that we use throughout ServiceMix. There are really big ties between ServiceMix and the other projects. Another project that we can leverage in ServiceMix is Apache ODE, which is the business process execution language (BPEL) Engine.
Gardner: Now, it's not always easy to determine the number of implementations, particularly in production, for open-source projects and code. It's a bit easier when you have a commercial vendor. You can track their sales or revenues and you have a sense of what the market is doing.
Do you have any insight into what's been going on, in a larger trend around these SOA open-source projects in terms of implementation volumes? Are we still in test, are people in pilot, or are we seeing a bit more. And, what trends are there around actual production implementation? I'll throw that to either one, Adrian or Guillaume.
Trenaman: I’m happy to chip in there. We’ve seen, quite a lot of work in terms of real-world sales. So you started in ServiceMix, obviously. We have been using ServiceMix for some time with our customers, and we have seen it used and deployed, in anger, if you will. What's interesting for me is the number of different kinds of users out there, the different markets that it gets deployed in. We have had users in airline solutions, in retail, and extensive use in government situations as well.
We recently finished a project in mobile health, where we used ServiceMix to take information from a government health backbone, using HL7 formatted messages, and get that information onto the PDAs of the health-care officials like doctors and nurses. So this is a really, really interesting use case in the healthcare arena, where we’ve got ServiceMix in deployment.
It’s used in a number of cases as well for financial messaging. Recently, I was working with a customer, who hoped to use ServiceMix to route messages between central securities depositories, so they were using SWIFT messages over ServiceMix. We’re getting to see a really nice uptake of new users in new areas, but we also have lots of battle-hardened deployments now in production.
Gardner: One of the nice things about this trend towards adoption is that you often get more contributions back into the project. Maybe it would be good now to understand who is involved with Apache, who is really contributing, and who is filling out the feature sets and defining the requirements around ServiceMix. Guillaume, do you have any thoughts about who is really behind this in terms of the authoring and requirements?
From the community
Nodet: The main thing is that everything comes from the community at large. It’s mainly users asking how they can implement a given use case. Sometimes, we don't have everything set up to fulfill the use case in the easiest way. In such a case, we try to enhance ServiceMix to cover more use cases.
In terms of contributors, we have lots of people working for different companies. Most of them are IT companies who are working and implementing SOA architecture for one of their customers and they are using ServiceMix.
We have a number of individual contractors who do some consulting around ServiceMix and they are contributing back to the software. So, it's really a diverse community. Progress is, obviously, one of the big proponents of Apache ServiceMix. As you have said, we run our business using the FUSE family of projects.
So, it's really a very diverse community and with different people from different origins, from everywhere in the world. We have Italian guys, we have, obviously, US people, and we have a big committee.
Gardner: The JBI specification has been quite central to ServiceMix. If you could, give us an update on what JBI, as its own spec, has been up to, and what that means for ServiceMix, and ultimately FUSE. Furthermore, let's get into some of the OSGi developments. It has really become hot pretty quickly in the market. So what's up with JBI and OSGi?
Nodet: The JBI specification has been out since the beginning of 2005. It defines an architecture to build some ESBs in Java. The main thing is that the key concept is normalized exchanges. This means that you can deploy components on the JBI container, and all of these components will be able to work together without any problems because they share a common knowledge of exchanges, and the messages between components are implemented. This is really a key point.
Anyone can grab a third party component from outside ServiceMix. There are a number of examples of components that exist, and you can grab such a component and deploy it in ServiceMix and it will just work.
That's really one of the main points behind the JBI specification. It’s a Java centric specification. I mean that the implementation has to be done in Java, but ServiceMix allows a lot of different clients from other technologies to jump into the bus and exchange data with other components.
So one of the things that we use for that is a STOMP protocol, which is a text-based messaging protocol. We have lots of different implementations from Ruby, Python, JavaScript and lots of different languages that you can use to talk to the ServiceMix bus.
OSGi is a specification that is really old, about 10 years, at least. It was originally designed for embedded devices. During the past two years, we have seen a lot of traction in the enterprise market to push OSGi. The main thing is that the next major version of ServiceMix, which will be ServiceMix 4.0, is based on OSGi and reuses the OSGi benefit.
The main driver behind that was mainly to get around some weaknesses of the JBI specification mainly related to the JBI packaging and class loader architecture. OSGi is really a nice specification for that and we decided to use it for the next version of ServiceMix.
Gardner: Now, we tend to see a little bit of politics oftentimes in the market around specifications, standards, who supports them, whether there is a competing approach, and where that goes. We’ve seen a bit of that in the Java Community Process over the years. I wonder, Adrian, if you might be able to set the table, if you will, around where these specifications are and what some of the commercial interests are?
For example, I know that IBM is quite strong behind OSGi, and Oracle has backed it to an extent as well. These guys, obviously, have quite a bit clout in the market. Set the table on the vendors and the specification situation now.
Sticking with JBI 1.0
Trenaman: JBI is currently at version 1.0, or 1.11 actually. There is a JBI 2.0 expert group, and I believe they are working under JSR 312. So, I think there’s work going on to advance that specification.
However, if you look at what the vendors are doing -- be it Sun, Progress, or Red Hat through JBoss -- I think the vendors are all sticking with JBI 1.0 at the moment, making customers successful with that version of the spec and in anticipation of a new version of the spec. But, I believe it’s quite quiet. Guillaume, is that correct, for 2.0?
Nodet: Yes. I am part of the 2.0 expert group for JBI and the activity has been quite low recently. One main driver behind JBI 2.0 is to refocus on what I explained is the key point of the JBI 1.0 specification, which is the concept of normalized exchanges and the normalized message router.
The goal of the JBI 2.0 Expert Group I think is to refocus on that and making JBI play much more nicely with other specifications that somewhat are seen as opponents to JBI, like SCA, and also play more nicely with OSGi because ServiceMix is not the only JBI implementation that goes towards the OSGi way. So we want also to be sure that everything aligns correctly.
Gardner: Just so listeners can understand, what is it about OSGi that is valuable or beneficial as a container in an architectural approach, when used in conjunction with the SOA architectural component?
Trenaman: OSGi is the top of the art, in terms of deployment. It really is what we’ve all wanted for years. I’ve lost enough follicles on my head fixing class-path issues and that kind of class-path hell.
OSGi gives us a badly needed packaging system and a component-based modular deployment system for Java. It piles in some really neat features in terms of life cycle -- being able to start and shut down services, define dependencies between services and between deployment bundles, and also then to do versioning as well.
The ability to have multiple versions of the same service in the same JVM with no class-path conflicts is a massive success. What OSGi really does is clean up the air in terms of Java deployment and Java modularity. So, for me, it's an absolute no-brainer, and I have seen customers who have led the charge on this. This modular framework is not necessarily something that the industry is pushing on the consumers. The consumers are actually pulling us along.
I have worked with customers who have been using OSGi for the last year-and-a-half or two years, and they are making great strides in terms of making their application architecture clean and modular and very easy and flexible to deploy. So, I’ve seen a lot of goodness come out of OSGi and the enterprise. You mentioned politics earlier on, Dana, and the politics for me are interesting on the number of levels.
Here is my take on it. The first level is on the OSGi core platform, and what you’ve got there is a number of players who are all, in some sense I guess, competing to get the de-facto standard implementation or reference implementation. I think Eclipse Equinox emerges as the winner. They are now strongly backed by IBM.
The key players
And in the Apache Software Foundation you’ve got Felix. One of the other key players will be Knopplerfish OSGi, which is really Makewave, and they deliver Knopplerfish under a BSD-style license. So, we have some healthy competition there, but I guess in terms of feature build out Equinox seems to be the winner in that area.
That's one way of looking at it. The other thing is, if you look at your traditional app server vendors and what they are doing, IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, and Sun have all put OSGi, or are about to put OSGi, within their application servers. This is a massive movement.
I think it's interesting that OSGi is no longer a differentiator. It’s actually an important gatekeeper. You have to have it. This is a wave that the industry and that our customers are all riding, and I think they are very welcoming to it.
Politically, all of the app server vendors seem to be massively behind OSGi and supportive of it. The other area that maybe you alluded to is that in the broader Java community, there’s been a debate that's gone for some time now about JSR 277, which is the Java Community Process attempt at Java modules. The scene there is that JSR 277 overlaps massively with what OSGi intends to achieve, or rather has already achieved.
That starts getting messy all over again, because Java 7.0 will include JSR 277. So the future of Java seems to have hooked into this Java module specification, and not taking what would be the sensible choice, which would be to follow an OSGi based model, or at least to passionately embrace OSGi and weave it in a very nice way into JSR 277.
So, there is still some distance to go there on that debate over which one actually gets accepted and gets embraced by the community. I think the happiest conclusion for that is where JSR 277 really does embrace what OSGi has done, and actually, in a sense, builds support into the Java language for OSGi.
Gardner: Clearly, the momentum around OSGi has been substantial. I’ve been amazed at how far this has come so quickly.
Trenaman: Exactly.
Gardner: Now, IONA now within Progress Software, is in this not just for “peace on earth and good will toward men.” With the latest FUSE version being 4.0, you have a certification, support, and enterprise-ready service value around the ServiceMix core. Is there something about OSGi that helps Progress in delivering this to market, given the modularity and the better control and management aspects? I am thinking, if I am in certification and enterprise-ready mode for these, that OSGi actually helps me, is that correct?
It's a community issue
Trenaman: My perspective on that would be that embracing of OSGi in FUSE is a community issue. It’s the community that's driven that and that's a part of ServiceMix. So, this is something that we in Progress now are quite happy to embrace and then take into FUSE.
For me, what the OSGi gives us is clearly a much better plug-in framework, into which we can drop value-added services and into which we can extend. I think the OSGi framework is great for that, as well as in terms of management, maybe moving toward grid computing. The stuff that we get from OSGi allowed us to be far more dynamic in the way we provision services.
Gardner: Great. Now, you mentioned the big “grid” word. A lot is being talked about these days in cloud computing, and there’s an interesting intersection here between open-source early adopters and the very technology savvy providers or companies and the cloud phenomenon.
We’ve seen some quite successful cloud implementations at such organizations as Google, Yahoo!, and Amazon, and we’re starting to see more with chat in the market from Microsoft and IBM that they are going to get into this as well.
These are the organizations that are looking for control, the ability to extend code and “roll their own.” That's where their value add is. What's the intersection between SOA, open-source infrastructure, and these cloud implementations? Then, we’ll talk about where these clouds might go in terms of enterprises themselves. Who wants to take the high view on the cloud and open-source SOA discussion?
Trenaman: A lot of SOA is down to simply "Good Design 101." The separation of the interface from the implementation is absolutely key, and then location independence, as well. You know, being able to access a service of some kind and actually not really care exactly where that is on the cloud, so that the whole infrastructure behind the service is transparent. You do not get to see it.
SOA brings some very nice concepts in terms of contract-first design and standard-based specification of interfaces, be they using WSDL or just plain old XML and REST -- or even XML and JMS.
I think the fact that we can now define in a well-understood way what these services are, and that allows us to get the data into and out of the cloud in a standardized way. I think that's massively important. That's one of the things that SOA brings to the cloud that becomes very important.
What open-source brings to cloud, apart from quality software against which to build massively distributed systems. What it brings is maybe a business model or a deployment model that actually suits the cloud.
I think of the traditional software licensing models for closed source where you are charging per CPU. When you look at massive cloud deployments with virtual machines on many different physical hardware boxes, those models just don't seem to work.
Gardner: A great deal of virtualization is taking place in these cloud infrastructures.
A natural approach
Trenaman: I think open source becomes a very natural and desirable approach in terms of the technologies that you are going to use in terms of accessing the cloud and actually implementing services on the cloud. Then, in order to get those services there in the first place, SOA is pivotal. The best practices and designs that we got from the years we have been doing SOA certainly come into play there.
Gardner: Let's move into this notion of a private cloud, which also requires us to understand a hybrid, or managing what takes place within a private, on-premises cloud infrastructure -- and then some of these other available services from other large consumer-facing and business-facing cloud providers.
Vendors and, in many cases, community development organizations are starting to salivate over this opportunity to provide the software, services, and support in helping enterprises create that more efficient, high availability, much more creative utilization range incumbent in a well-designed cloud infrastructure or grid or utility infrastructure.
Trenaman: Sure.
Gardner: It seems unlikely that an organization creating one of these clouds is going to go out and just buy it out of the box. It seems much more likely that, at least for the early adoption stages, this is going to be a great opportunity to be exerting your own special sauce as an internal IT organization, well versed in open-source community development projects and then delivering services back to your employees and your customers and your business partners in such a way that you can really reduce your total cost, gain agility, and gain more control.
Let's go to Guillaume. How do you see ServiceMix, in particular, playing in this movement, now that we are just starting to see the opening innings of private cloud infrastructure?
Nodet: ServiceMix has long been a way that you can distribute your SOA artifacts. ServiceMix is an ESB and by nature, it can be distributed, so it's really easy to start several instances of ServiceMix and make them seamlessly talk together in a high availability way.
The thing that you do not really see yet is all the management and all the monitoring stuff that is needed when you deploy in such an architecture. So ServiceMix can really be used readily to fulfill the core infrastructure.
ServiceMix itself does not aim at providing all the management tools that you could find from either commercial vendors or even open-source. So, on this particular topic, ServiceMix, backed by Progress, is bringing a lot of value to our customers. Progress now has the ability to provide such software.
Gardner: So, Progress has had quite a long history, several decades, in bringing enterprise development and deployment strategies, platforms, tools, a full solution. This seems to be a pretty good heritage combined with what community development can offer in starting to craft some of these solutions for private clouds and also to manage the boundaries, which I think is essential.
I can see an ESB really taking on a significantly larger role in managing the boundaries between and among different cloud implementations for integration, data portability, and transactional integration. Adrian anything to further add to that.
Dynamic provisioning
Trenaman: Certainly, you could always see the ESBs being sort of on the periphery of the cloud, getting data in and out. That's a clear use case. There is something a little sweeter, though, about ServiceMix, particularly ServiceMix 4, because it's absolutely geared for dynamic provisioning.
You can imagine having an instance of ServiceMix 4 that you know is maybe just an image that you are running on several virtual machines. The first thing it does is contact a grid controller and says, “Well, okay, what bundles do you want me to deploy?” That means we can actually have the grid controller farming out particular applications to the containers that are available.
If a container goes down, then the grid controller will restart applications or bundles on different computing resources. With OSGi at the core of ServiceMix, at the core of the ESB, that’s a step forward now in terms of dynamic provisioning and really like an autonomous competing infrastructure.
Nodet: Another thing I just want to add about ServiceMix 4, complementing what Adrian, just said is that ServiceMix split into several sub-projects. One of them is ServiceMix Kernel, which is an OSGi enhanced runtime that can be used for provisioning education, and this container is able to deploy virtually any kind of abstract. So, it can support Web applications, and it can support JBI abstracts, because the JBI container is reusing it, but you can really deploy anything that you want.
So, this piece of software can really be leveraged in cloud infrastructure by virtually deploying any application that you want. It could be plain Web services without using an ESB if you don’t have such a need. So it's really pervasive.
Gardner: We were quite early in this whole definition of what private cloud would or wouldn't be. Even the word “cloud,” of course, is quite nebulous nowadays.
I do see a huge opportunity here, given also the economic pressures that many organizations are going to be facing in the coming years. It's really essential to do more with less. As we move toward these cloud implementations, you certainly want to be able to recognize that it isn't defined. It's a work in progress, and having agility, flexibility, visibility into the code, understanding the origin for the code, and the licensing and so forth, I think is extremely important.
Trenaman: It’s massively important for anyone building the cloud, particularly a public cloud. That has got to be watched with total care.
Gardner: We’ve been talking about SOA infrastructure, getting some updates and refreshers on the ServiceMix and Apache Foundation approaches. talking to some community and thought leaders. We've learned a little bit more also about Progress Software and FUSE 4.0.
I’m very interested and excited about these cloud opportunities for developers to use as they already are. The uptake in Amazon Web Services for development activities and test-and-deploy scenarios and performance testing has been astonishing.
Microsoft is going to be right behind them with an appeal to developers to build on a Microsoft cloud. These are going to be ongoing and interesting, and so managing them is going to be critical to their success. A key differentiator from one enterprise to another it is how well they can take advantage of these, and manage the boundaries quite well.
I want to thank our participants. We have been joined by Guillaume Nodet. He is the software architect at Progress Software and vice president of Apache ServiceMix. Thank you, Guillaume, we really appreciate your input.
Nodet: No problem. I am glad that we have been able to do this.
Gardner: We have also been joined by Adrian Trenaman. He is distinguish consultant at Progress Software. Great to have you with us, Adrian.
Trenaman: It's a pleasure.
Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. I want to thank our sponsor for today's podcast, Progress Software. We’re coming to you through the BriefingsDirect Network. Thanks for listening and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: Progress Software.
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast with Guillaume Nodet and Adrian Trenaman of Progress Software on directions and trends in SOA and open source. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
TOGAF 9 Advances IT Maturity While Offering More Paths to Architecture-Level IT Improvement
Transcript of a podcast on the evolution of the TOGAF 9 architectural framework, announced at The Open Group's 21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego, February 2009.
Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.
Today, we welcome our listeners to a sponsored podcast discussion coming to you from The Open Group’s 21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego, Feb. 3, 2009. Our topic for this podcast, which is part of a series of podcasts on events and major topics of this conference, centers on TOGAF 9, the newly released enterprise architecture framework.
The framework, the latest in the series, was released here Feb. 2 at the conference, and it really represents a departure for The Open Group and for enterprise architecture frameworks in general. It's larger, more mature, and modular to allow folks to enter it from a variety of perspectives. It takes on a much more significant business services and accomplishments perspective.
While IT practitioners and architects will be looking over TOGAF 9 deeply, it’s also going to be of interest to the business side of the enterprise and will be a way for them to understand more about how IT can service their business needs.
To guide us through our discussion on the evolution of TOGAF 9, where it's come from and where it is today, we're joined by Robert Weisman, CEO and principal consultant for Build The Vision, based in Ottawa. Welcome to show, Robert.
Robert Weisman: Delighted to be here.
Gardner: We're also joined by Mike Turner, an enterprise architect at Capgemini, based in London. Welcome to the show.
Mike Turner: Thanks, Dana.
Gardner: It's been my contention for some time now that architecture is destiny. How well you do architecture has a deep impact on your cost, your benefits, your quality of services, and ultimately, how competitive and well run you are as an enterprise.
Let’s go first to Robert. Do you agree that architecture is destiny, and is it perhaps more so now than ever?
Weisman: I can see architecture being an integral part of the business planning process. It structures the business plans and makes sure that the objectives are realizable. In other words, we can use the acronym SMART, specific, measurable, actionable, realizable, and time bound. What TOGAF 9 does is provide an overarching vision and capability with which to cooperate.
Gardner: Let’s take the same question over to you, Mike, this notion that how well you do architecture is a rather important aspect of your competencies of business. [Read more on a panel discussion about the importance of enterprise architecture.]
Turner: Architecture is definitely a factor. I see architecture as a set of tools and techniques that can help you achieve what you want to do as a business. Taking architecture in isolation is not necessarily going to achieve the right things for your organization, because you actually need to have the direction as an input for architecture to support achievement of a particular outcome.
Architecture is really a vital tool for is being able to assure that the correct business outcome is achieved. You need to have a structured approach to how you define the problem space that businesses are facing, then define the solution space, and define how you move from where you are right now to where you want to be.
If that’s not managed in a structured and traceable way that takes you from strategy through to realization, it’s very easy to go off track. It’s very easy for people to reinterpret what the business needs. It's very easy for technology projects, in particular, to take on a life of their own and deliver something, but not necessarily the thing that was originally intended.
So, in some way, architecture is that essential toolkit to make sure that the achievement of change is realized effectively from a content perspective.
Gardner: Change, of course, is a very important aspect of business nowadays, with a difficult economic climate and rapid change across many different industries, how they finance themselves, what their customers are doing, as well as the supply chain. Before we get more deeply into TOGAF 9 and frameworks, what does architecture bring to the ability of an organization to change rapidly?
Mergers and acquisitions
Weisman: When you're talking about change in this climate, there's going to be a great many mergers and acquisitions. Having been through them, there are two ways of going through them -- painful and less painful. Architecture is certainly a less painful way of doing it.
If you want to use knowledge in a knowledge-based economy, you want to make sure, when you actually acquire a company, that they stay acquired, that they don’t just walk. You have to know what they have. You have to also know the value of the soft assets within a company, and that’s what architecture brings to the fore. It brings out clearly the full value of the company, and make sure, before you do an acquisition or a merger, that you can compare the companies and do due diligence to determine whether there is actually a fit.
Gardner: Mike Turner, how about this change aspect and how architecture might be a serious foundation for good change management?
Turner: That question would have a different answer depending on the type of change that you are looking and dealing with. There are some changes that organizations are prepared to encounter and are anticipating. In those cases, architecture is a really good tool to help you to become more effective at dealing with those changes as they happen.
A good example of that would be a large organization that’s on an acquisition trail of buying up small organizations that operate in a similar business model as they do. Using architecture as a technique, you can actually say, "When we acquire a business, we expect it to have these capabilities. This is how we would take those capabilities into our environment." You can quite quickly absorb that change by having a repeatable approach to deal with it.
In those kind of spaces, architecture is really key, because you're anticipating the change, can plan for it, and can manage it strategically. If you don’t do that, then you end up having to face the problem afresh every time you encounter this situation and become ineffective at dealing with those kinds of repeatable processes.
Gardner: What about the discipline that’s required through adoption of a framework, that then puts you in a position to be able to be fleet and agile, when the unanticipated changes are required?
Turner: The other class of change is the change that you weren’t expecting. In those situations, your organization needs to be structured or siloed in ways that actually allow you to quickly reorganize and do things that are unexpected.
In those kind of situations, there's a component where architecture is helpful and then there's a piece where a architecture probably isn’t going to help you at all, because you're dealing with something that’s outside of what you understand today.
Architecture can help you structure your organization so that it's flexible. Outside of that, you're really into the space of a more agile-type approach, where you're not prepared to deal with things, and you just need to try something out, do something quickly, do something tactical, and build from that.
Plan for change
Weisman: There's an old adage that a plan is a common basis for change. If you don’t have the plan or your architectural framework, change is very difficult. Secondly, there is the old Roman adage, which basically says that luck is only where opportunity meets preparation. Architecture is that preparation or part of the preparation for that.
Gardner: Let’s take a brief trip down memory lane. I spoke to Allen Brown, the CEO of The Open Group, and he said that 9 coming out was, in a sense, like giving birth. It was a long gestation period and then a rather difficult last few days. So now that its out, tell us what the frameworks were like leading up to TOGAF 9, and then particularly what differentiates or distinguishes 9. We'll start with you Robert.
Weisman: TOGAF 9, first of all, is more business focused. Before that it was definitely in the IT realm, and IT was essentially defined as hardware and software. The definition of IT in TOGAF 9 is the lifecycle management of information and related technology within an organization. It puts much more emphasis on the actual information, its access, presentation, and quality, so that it can provide not only transaction processing support, but analytical processing support for critical business decisions.
The gestation took five years. I've been part of the forum for five years working on the TOGAF 9. Part of the challenge was that we had such an incredible take up of TOGAF 8. Once a standard has been taken up, you can’t change it on a dime. You don’t want to change it on a dime, but you want to keep it dynamic, update it, and incorporate best practices. That would explain some of the gestation period. TOGAF 8 was very successful, and to get TOGAF 9 right, it was a little longer cycle, but I think it’s been well worth the wait.
Gardner: Mike, what more generally has been the shift or change over time in how frameworks have been developed? Obviously, they've gotten larger and are more inclusive, but more generally, as a character of what they're trying to accomplish, how have frameworks changed over the past 20 years?
Turner: If you look at the industry in general, we're going through a process where the IT industry is maturing and becoming more stable, and change is becoming more incremental in the industry. What you see in architecture frameworks is a cycle of discovery, invention, and then consolidation that follows, as consensus is reached.
One thing that’s really key about TOGAF 9 is that it takes a lot of ideas and practices that exist within individual organizations or proprietary frameworks, building a consensus around it, and releasing it into a public-domain context.
Once that happens, the value you can get from that approach increases exponentially. Now, you're not talking about going to one vendor and having to deal with one particular set of concepts, and then going to a different vendor and having to deal with another set of concepts, and dealing with the interoperability between those.
You're in a situation where the industry agrees this is the way to do things. Suddenly, the economies of scale that you can get from that, as all the participants in the industry starts to converge on that consensus, mean that you get a whole set of new opportunities about how you can use architecture.
Vendor and technology neutral
Gardner: For those listeners who might not be familiar, The Open Group is a vendor-neutral and technology-neutral consortium. TOGAF, which is The Open Group Architecture Framework, is free in its online form, and there's a charge for the printed version.
About 7,500 individuals currently hold TOGAF certification, which is another important aspect of TOGAF, basically approving that you have the knowledge, experience, and understanding to carry it through. To date, 90,000 copies of TOGAF framework have been downloaded and 20,000 hard copies have been sold.
Let’s go back to Robert Weisman. Let’s look a little deeper at what distinguishes TOGAF 9. We mentioned the modularity. There is also the deeper use of the architecture development method. There is also a bit more inclusive comfort, if you will, with cloud computing and service-oriented architecture (SOA), and thinking more of security, start to finish and holistically. Maybe we could go through a laundry list of what distinguishes TOGAF 9.
Weisman: There are many particular factors. TOGAF 9 is, in certain ways, an evolutionary change and in certain other ways a revolutionary change. The architecture development methodology has basically remained similar. However, transforming the architecture from concept into a reality has basically been expanded pretty dramatically, with a great many lessons learned. So, architecture transformation is a large one. Various architectural frameworks have been incorporated into it.
A great many concepts that allow enterprise architecture to be molded with operations management, with system design, portfolio management, business planning, and the Governance Institute's COBIT guidelines and other industry standards have also been incorporated into TOGAF.
Also, there's been a major contribution by such companies as Capgemini, with respect to artifacts and structure. The content meta model is a huge contribution and as a core contribution, but Mike can elaborate upon that.
Overall, it’s much more extensive and it covers much more of the issues that most CIOs and IT architects have to confront on a daily basis. The nice thing about TOGAF is that you don’t have to use it all. You can use bits of it. You can use a large chunk of it, or you can basically choose to use in its entirety. It’s a very modular and flexible framework that way.
Gardner: As I understand it, with 9 they have made a pathway. If you've already adopted 8, you have a bit of a head start, but you don’t have to have gone to 8 in order to start adopting 9. You can work through different modules and start fresh, which I think is a bit of a departure from the past.
Let’s go over to Mike at Capgemini. Tell us about the meta model, and particularly how the use of repositories for policy driven governance and for the organization of assets across both IT and business become relevant now. [More on how Capgemini views cloud computing.]
Addressing challenges
Turner: If we rewind to TOGAF 8 and talk about some of our experiences using TOGAF 8, that's probably a good way to frame what we've tried to add into TOGAF 9 to address some of those challenges that we have encountered.
TOGAF 8, in our experience, was a very powerful process that you could follow to develop architectures. Where you started to hit limitations with TOGAF 8 was around the work products that you produced as a part of executing the architecture development method.
So TOGAF 8 has a lot of language that talks quite informally about the type of activities that an architect would carry out and the type of work products that they would create.
For example, it discusses creating business scenarios and process models and looking at logical data models and physical data models. There's a lot of language in TOGAF 8 that refers to modeling concepts, but then there is nothing actually in TOGAF 8 that says, "This is what a good deliverable looks like," or "This is actually how you would approach modeling those concepts formally."
What we find are organizations that are using TOGAF 8 effectively have two choices. They can adopt the process and leave the content side of things quite open-ended, or they can adopt the process and select something else to do with the content.
At Capgemini, we had a proprietary internal framework for content prior to TOGAF 9. We did a lot of work taking TOGAF 8 process and Capgemini content framework and putting the two together. We found that to be a really effective combination.
What we also found was that, because of the proprietary nature of the Capgemini framework, it became quite difficult for organizations to adopt that configuration. While we're working entirely within a Capgemini environment and we've got control over the people, the skills, the knowledge, and the approach, that works really well. But, when you're looking at multi-vendor sourcing models or looking at upskilling an end user organization, it becomes a lot more difficult.
What we wanted to do with TOGAF 9 was to address that problem head on and to try to create something equivalent to the Capgemini proprietary framework in a way that allows incremental evolution out of TOGAF 8. We took a lot of the informal concepts that were defined in TOGAF 8 and tried to formalize those around some of our internal thinking for content.
Gardner: What is the upside now, since we've made this transition to 9, for the strategic use of repositories?
Turner: One of the things that we've been working on quite heavily over the past few years is getting the various tool vendors to support the Capgemini framework. We've got quite a long list of tool vendors supporting this framework model. What we are expecting is a small incremental effort for those same vendors to transition and make what are essentially cosmetic changes to be able to support the TOGAF 9 content framework.
Very soon, we'll be in a position where we're looking at a market for enterprise architecture tools, where there is now a level of consensus about how to structure models and how to represent them in a way that didn’t exist before. That can only be a good thing for enterprise repositories, because we're moving closer and closer to that consensus point about how content should be structured.
The problem that we're unable to solve is then to take that model, go one step further, and look at the actual operating model within a particular enterprise, how that enterprise chooses to assign roles and responsibilities for carrying out architecture, and how it chooses to federate governance and those kind of concerns. This is fundamental to how you structure repository, because the repository needs to reflect the partitioning that you actually hold within your organizational structure.
We'll see a big improvement, but it’s not the solution in its entirety.
Gardner: Repositories will include a number of different types of artifacts and services, and each organization will have a unique way of approaching that, given their legacy and their history. We do seem to have reached somewhat of a tipping point in recognizing that to manage complexity, to adopt SOA principles effectively and extend them holistically to start dabbling in cloud computing and take advantage of resources and assets available through that particular model or set of models. Does this increasingly require this organizational framework of repository. Do you agree with that Robert?
Underlying rigor
Weisman: No. I've been an enterprise architect now since 1985, and many of these terms come and go. Underlying it is a certain degree of rigor that the frameworks provide.
It doesn’t matter what environment you go into, but if you have a client with 500 definitions of client, their customers, and you're trying to integrate that to take an overview of the customer throughout goodness knows how many databases, what happens is there is certainly a cogent case for consolidating that.
Many organizations carry orders of magnitude more information than they need. The implications for the information technology infrastructure are immense, and the quality of information because of that is pitiful, not allowing the business executives to make proper decisions.
Whether you do cloud computing or not is immaterial. Whatever paradigm you choose, as long as you apply it in a professional and effective manner, it will work. Trying to use a silver-bullet type of approach and a new name to circumscribe rigorous engineering and professional principles would be a grave error.
Gardner: Okay, fair enough. What is it about TOGAF 9, in particular, that does grease the skids a bit for organizations to better adopt and utilize SOA principles, services like software-as-a-service (SaaS), or infrastructure-as-a-service, what we loosely call cloud nowadays?
Weisman: TOGAF was based on a foundational architecture called the Technical Reference Model, which came out of the U.S. many years ago. It's all service oriented.
The term SOA is old wine in new bottles. It's been around for a long time. If you just have a service catalog, if you have duplicate services, it becomes very evident. That’s one of the advantages of the repositories -- you can have an insight into what you actually have.
TOGAF, from its outset in the early 1990s, has been service oriented for that. Just by applying TOGAF, you have a chance of doing your Gap Analysis, of having the visibility into what you have, which makes it not only efficient, but effective from a business perspective.
Gardner: Anything to offer, Mike?
Two points of view
Turner: When you look at SOA, there are probably two different ways that you can think about IT. One offers quite limited benefits to an organization, and the other offers much greater benefit. At a technical level, there are a bunch of standards and design approaches referred to as SOA, that really deal with standardizing the way the applications talk to one another at a software level.
Implementing SOA in this technical sense isn't necessarily a bad thing, and there are certainly benefits to be had in terms of interoperability at a software level from implementing SOA principles. But, just working at that level on its own is not going to give you any business advantages. It’s just going to make it easier to execute development projects.
The power of thinking about services is much more centered on how you look at your organizational capability and how you can more effectively break down your organization into discrete capabilities that are not replicating the same data, business processes, and IT systems in multiple silos.
If you can have a more granular business organization, where you are replicating capability less, it’s much easier to change more quickly, it’s much easier to use those capabilities to do different things, and you see a step change in the performance of your business.
We need to get those kinds of SOA benefits. The first and most important question to ask is, "What are the services that I need in my business? How should I structure my business to make it meet the goals of the industry?" That may be flexibility, but there are actually some organizations or some parts of your enterprise where you actually don’t desire flexibility. You want stability, cost efficiency, and effectiveness in a much more linear, repeatable sense.
TOGAF allows you to understand what makes your business good and then identify what your services are in a way that considers all the different angles. Once that’s defined, you can then put the right technology underneath that to realize what the business is actually looking for. That’s something that can have an absolutely transformational effect on your business.
Gardner: You mentioned that architecture and SOA by themselves don't necessarily aid a business in achieving its goals, but TOGAF 9 has taken steps over this past five years to increase its relevance to business. Robert, explain how that takes place and what that really means?
Weisman: We're talking about services here. The old TOGAF used to talk in terms of the Technical Reference Model. That's still in 9, but we're looking at business services, as Mike was alluding to. We're looking at rationalizing business services and making sure that they're basically well supported by that.
It also assumes that, when you're doing your preliminary planning, you come up with a framework that recognizes the business operation model within your organization and that you have identified your stakeholders and what they actually want to see in the enterprise architecture framework.
Lack of vision
Most projects fail, because they don’t have proper preliminary planning, and they don’t basically go through the problem. They don’t go through the effort of putting a vision in place. As a consequence, they just jump into the architecture -- usually into the applications and technology architecture -- and they find themselves in trouble very quickly for that. They get a great deal of dissatisfaction.
Outsourcing is an excellent example where a high degree of enterprise architecture maturity correlates to a high degree of satisfaction from both the client and vendor of outsourcing services.
Satisfaction, according to Peter Weill’s book, Enterprise Architecture as Strategy, essentially goes from 50-50 with poorer enterprise architecture maturity to 90-90 with enterprise architecture maturity, and that’s satisfaction both for a client and vendor.
So it ends up being a win-win.
When I talk about outsourced services, they are not necessarily all technology either. They can be business processes that are now being outsourced as well, and it will work its way up the stack.
Gardner: We've talked about architecture as important, of course, but the people who then implement the architecture are quite important. To what degree is certification now a particularly relevant aspect of success in a down economy?
Labor issues and getting good people have been a challenge. There have been significant layoffs, but there has also been an increase in the demand for strong IT to support change in a dynamic business environment. Let’s start with you Robert, the role of certification in the year 2009?
Weisman: First of all, there are two dimensions of certification. For example in The Open Group, you have certification with respect to knowledge of the TOGAF methodology, and then you have IT architecture certification. IT architecture is much broader. It includes business architects and enterprise architects as well, and that takes a look at competencies.
There are no international standards for IT architecture. There are many consultancies that work globally. So, all of a sudden, you're called upon, but this provide a global standard and a global level of confidence with respect to the individuals.
The IT Architect Certification (ITAC) and the IT Services Certification (ITSC) that The Open Group are doing, will provide a level of comfort and assurance to clients that basically they are getting people with a uniform degree of competence.
With respect to the downturn, this is going to become important. Right now, most architects call themselves architects, but there is no international standard against which to measure them. That’s led to a great many architecture failures, which, when you examine them, are not surprising.
Using a standard methodology will also enable RFPs to be written rapidly. What happens is now when you say, "I want a vision as per TOGAF," everybody knows what the baseline is. Then, both suppliers and clients can come up with the assurance, saying, "These guys know what they're talking about," and they can put in a reasonable bid for that.
You're talking about the standardization of product and competencies. This is becoming increasingly important. Globally, there's a huge decrease in enrollment in computer science and computer engineering programs, because of the fact that clients aren’t recognizing these professional designations. Many people say there's no business case in going through an expensive degree program, when you can take a short course and have a very deep but very narrow competency in a particular field?
Certification, both from a competency point of view and from a product point of view, is the wave of the future and extremely important.
Gardner: Mike, how does Capgemini look at the certification process and how important it is for your clients?
Demonstrating capability
Turner: It’s very important, and there are two reasons why. If you look externally in trying to source resources from the market -- whether that’s through a subcontractor or to recruit individuals -- having certification is a good way for candidates to be able to demonstrate that they have reached a level of capability and also for potential employers to put in place a benchmark that filters out the noise.
They can spend much more time looking at individual candidates and assessing them as potential fits to the roles that they're trying to source. I wouldn’t say that certification necessarily guarantees that you get the right person, but it gets you to a short list much quicker.
Gardner: How about practitioners themselves? Is there a significant boost in the pay or ability to find the right jobs as a result of this TOGAF certification?
Turner: If you look at the UK market, there is a correlation between certification and higher pay, but I wouldn’t that that’s the absolute overriding factor.
Another angle to this is, if you look within an organization -- and Capgemini as an organization has a large number of architects, but our client base has architects that work in their organizations -- certification starts to outline a career path for architects within an organization and to allow them to develop themselves and demonstrate that they are improving in capability.
Capgemini has a very active certification program, which we run internally and which is based on experience, engagement, and community. We find that to be a very effective way to build and maintain a community and show professional development and mentoring within our internal environment. That’s something that we help our clients do as well.
Ultimately, architecture is about a network of people. It's about communicating effectively within that network, and then that network having a good face to all the stakeholders for architecture. Having training certification, professional development, and those factors can only be a good thing for building that practice.
Gardner: We're going to be wrapping up in a bit. It’s clearly too soon to look into the future. We just got TOGAF 9 out of the gate. I wonder if there isn’t any extrapolation or looking from the vision point of view where we have come from TOGAF 8 to TOGAF 9, to perhaps give some indication to our listeners as to where TOGAF and enterprise architecture frameworks in general are headed.
Let’s start with you, Robert, for our last question. What can we say, given what we now know about TOGAF 9, as to where the next TOGAF might lead us?
Weisman: There are many working groups right now working on TOGAF, the next generation, whatever it’s going to be called, for example, the Information Architecture Working Group and the like. They've been established and they're looking towards the future and the strategy for that.
Working together
What I see eventually is a lot of these architectural frameworks will start emerging. One of the beauties of TOGAF is that it works very well in conjunction with other architectural frameworks. Let’s say that you're using another architectural framework, which a lot of the industry verticals have. Normally they're model based and TOGAF is mainly process based. They come together, extremely well together, and this is a major strength.
You can’t say, "I'm using this. I can’t use TOGAF." TOGAF will help you deliver the other framework. One of the major issues with many of the other frameworks is that they're wonderfully detailed models, but there is no methodology in place with which to deliver them in a systematic manner. So, I see TOGAF not in terms of an über framework, but certainly a cooperative framework.
It’s also linked with other management frameworks and it’s going to be closer to project management, portfolio management, and the like, which should make it an easier transition. An integrative framework of choice might be a way of describing where TOGAF is going. It's going to be a pointer to other standards and how to integrate them within a company.
We're not there to duplicate the work of other wonderful organizations. It’s how to integrate all the wonderful work, because right now, for executives at the CIO and CEO level, it’s pretty confusing out there.
Gardner: Mike Turner, do you agree on that particular extrapolation in the future of more inclusivity and convergence across business types of frameworks, or are there other future elements of TOGAF we should consider?
Turner: Those are all valid points, and I'd add a few more. One thing we're going to see with TOGAF 9 being available now in the industry is that there would be a reaction to that. A lot of the frameworks and standards that sit around the edge of TOGAF are going to realign slightly to make themselves more consistent with how TOGAF works, which, as Bob mentioned, will help TOGAF integrate some of these different approaches. That will happen without changing TOGAF itself. It would just be that the industry will change to be more aligned around the TOGAF model.
In terms of TOGAF development, there's going to be a big focus on people and organizational aspects within TOGAF, trying to formalize the different skills that are required and the different places where you can use TOGAF within an organization.
Ultimately, that will lead to much greater specialization of the method that we have right now, because we have a single method that applies at a very strategic level and also at a very tactical level. As we understand the organizational context, we can start to be more specific about how the method is applied in different contexts.
Another trend is around the formalization of the specification content. We would expect to see, particularly around a standard for managing this kind of massive information that you are managing semantic content and mature, that TOGAF will start to embrace some of those standards. Looking at formal languages for specifying the methodology and putting the tool set itself within software tools that can be customized and configured is something that we would look to do.
Gardner: Well, that gives us quite a bit to look forward to, some more maturity, even though we have reached a significant milestone in the current level of maturity.
We have been talking about TOGAF 9, its introduction and where its come from and part of its evolution. Our conversation today comes to you through the support of The Open Group, and we are coming to you from the 21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego, in February 2009.
I want to thank our panelists. We have been joined by Robert Weisman, CEO and principal consultant for Build The Vision. Thank you Robert.
Weisman: You're very welcome.
Gardner: Also Mike Turner, enterprise architect at Capgemini. Thanks so much, Mike.
Turner: Thanks.
Gardner: I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to BriefingsDirect. Thanks and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.
Transcript of a podcast on the development of the TOGAF 9 architectural framework, announced at The Open Group's 21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego, February 2009. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.
View more podcasts and resources from The Open Group's recent conferences and TOGAF 9 launch:
The Open Group's CEO Allen Brown interview
Live panel discussion on enterprise architecture trends
Reporting on the TOGAF 9 launch
Panel discussion on security trends and needs
Panel discussion on cloud computing and enterprise architecture
Access the conference proceedings
General TOGAF 9 information
Introduction to TOGAF 9 whitepaper
Whitepaper on migrating from TOGAF 8.1.1 to version 9
TOGAF 9 certification information
TOGAF 9 Commercial Licensing program information
Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.
Today, we welcome our listeners to a sponsored podcast discussion coming to you from The Open Group’s 21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego, Feb. 3, 2009. Our topic for this podcast, which is part of a series of podcasts on events and major topics of this conference, centers on TOGAF 9, the newly released enterprise architecture framework.
The framework, the latest in the series, was released here Feb. 2 at the conference, and it really represents a departure for The Open Group and for enterprise architecture frameworks in general. It's larger, more mature, and modular to allow folks to enter it from a variety of perspectives. It takes on a much more significant business services and accomplishments perspective.
While IT practitioners and architects will be looking over TOGAF 9 deeply, it’s also going to be of interest to the business side of the enterprise and will be a way for them to understand more about how IT can service their business needs.
To guide us through our discussion on the evolution of TOGAF 9, where it's come from and where it is today, we're joined by Robert Weisman, CEO and principal consultant for Build The Vision, based in Ottawa. Welcome to show, Robert.
Robert Weisman: Delighted to be here.
Gardner: We're also joined by Mike Turner, an enterprise architect at Capgemini, based in London. Welcome to the show.
Mike Turner: Thanks, Dana.
Gardner: It's been my contention for some time now that architecture is destiny. How well you do architecture has a deep impact on your cost, your benefits, your quality of services, and ultimately, how competitive and well run you are as an enterprise.
Let’s go first to Robert. Do you agree that architecture is destiny, and is it perhaps more so now than ever?
Weisman: I can see architecture being an integral part of the business planning process. It structures the business plans and makes sure that the objectives are realizable. In other words, we can use the acronym SMART, specific, measurable, actionable, realizable, and time bound. What TOGAF 9 does is provide an overarching vision and capability with which to cooperate.
Gardner: Let’s take the same question over to you, Mike, this notion that how well you do architecture is a rather important aspect of your competencies of business. [Read more on a panel discussion about the importance of enterprise architecture.]
Turner: Architecture is definitely a factor. I see architecture as a set of tools and techniques that can help you achieve what you want to do as a business. Taking architecture in isolation is not necessarily going to achieve the right things for your organization, because you actually need to have the direction as an input for architecture to support achievement of a particular outcome.
Architecture is really a vital tool for is being able to assure that the correct business outcome is achieved. You need to have a structured approach to how you define the problem space that businesses are facing, then define the solution space, and define how you move from where you are right now to where you want to be.
If that’s not managed in a structured and traceable way that takes you from strategy through to realization, it’s very easy to go off track. It’s very easy for people to reinterpret what the business needs. It's very easy for technology projects, in particular, to take on a life of their own and deliver something, but not necessarily the thing that was originally intended.
So, in some way, architecture is that essential toolkit to make sure that the achievement of change is realized effectively from a content perspective.
Gardner: Change, of course, is a very important aspect of business nowadays, with a difficult economic climate and rapid change across many different industries, how they finance themselves, what their customers are doing, as well as the supply chain. Before we get more deeply into TOGAF 9 and frameworks, what does architecture bring to the ability of an organization to change rapidly?
Mergers and acquisitions
Weisman: When you're talking about change in this climate, there's going to be a great many mergers and acquisitions. Having been through them, there are two ways of going through them -- painful and less painful. Architecture is certainly a less painful way of doing it.
If you want to use knowledge in a knowledge-based economy, you want to make sure, when you actually acquire a company, that they stay acquired, that they don’t just walk. You have to know what they have. You have to also know the value of the soft assets within a company, and that’s what architecture brings to the fore. It brings out clearly the full value of the company, and make sure, before you do an acquisition or a merger, that you can compare the companies and do due diligence to determine whether there is actually a fit.
Gardner: Mike Turner, how about this change aspect and how architecture might be a serious foundation for good change management?
Turner: That question would have a different answer depending on the type of change that you are looking and dealing with. There are some changes that organizations are prepared to encounter and are anticipating. In those cases, architecture is a really good tool to help you to become more effective at dealing with those changes as they happen.
A good example of that would be a large organization that’s on an acquisition trail of buying up small organizations that operate in a similar business model as they do. Using architecture as a technique, you can actually say, "When we acquire a business, we expect it to have these capabilities. This is how we would take those capabilities into our environment." You can quite quickly absorb that change by having a repeatable approach to deal with it.
In those kind of spaces, architecture is really key, because you're anticipating the change, can plan for it, and can manage it strategically. If you don’t do that, then you end up having to face the problem afresh every time you encounter this situation and become ineffective at dealing with those kinds of repeatable processes.
Gardner: What about the discipline that’s required through adoption of a framework, that then puts you in a position to be able to be fleet and agile, when the unanticipated changes are required?
Turner: The other class of change is the change that you weren’t expecting. In those situations, your organization needs to be structured or siloed in ways that actually allow you to quickly reorganize and do things that are unexpected.
In those kind of situations, there's a component where architecture is helpful and then there's a piece where a architecture probably isn’t going to help you at all, because you're dealing with something that’s outside of what you understand today.
Architecture can help you structure your organization so that it's flexible. Outside of that, you're really into the space of a more agile-type approach, where you're not prepared to deal with things, and you just need to try something out, do something quickly, do something tactical, and build from that.
Plan for change
Weisman: There's an old adage that a plan is a common basis for change. If you don’t have the plan or your architectural framework, change is very difficult. Secondly, there is the old Roman adage, which basically says that luck is only where opportunity meets preparation. Architecture is that preparation or part of the preparation for that.
Gardner: Let’s take a brief trip down memory lane. I spoke to Allen Brown, the CEO of The Open Group, and he said that 9 coming out was, in a sense, like giving birth. It was a long gestation period and then a rather difficult last few days. So now that its out, tell us what the frameworks were like leading up to TOGAF 9, and then particularly what differentiates or distinguishes 9. We'll start with you Robert.
Weisman: TOGAF 9, first of all, is more business focused. Before that it was definitely in the IT realm, and IT was essentially defined as hardware and software. The definition of IT in TOGAF 9 is the lifecycle management of information and related technology within an organization. It puts much more emphasis on the actual information, its access, presentation, and quality, so that it can provide not only transaction processing support, but analytical processing support for critical business decisions.
The gestation took five years. I've been part of the forum for five years working on the TOGAF 9. Part of the challenge was that we had such an incredible take up of TOGAF 8. Once a standard has been taken up, you can’t change it on a dime. You don’t want to change it on a dime, but you want to keep it dynamic, update it, and incorporate best practices. That would explain some of the gestation period. TOGAF 8 was very successful, and to get TOGAF 9 right, it was a little longer cycle, but I think it’s been well worth the wait.
Gardner: Mike, what more generally has been the shift or change over time in how frameworks have been developed? Obviously, they've gotten larger and are more inclusive, but more generally, as a character of what they're trying to accomplish, how have frameworks changed over the past 20 years?
Turner: If you look at the industry in general, we're going through a process where the IT industry is maturing and becoming more stable, and change is becoming more incremental in the industry. What you see in architecture frameworks is a cycle of discovery, invention, and then consolidation that follows, as consensus is reached.
One thing that’s really key about TOGAF 9 is that it takes a lot of ideas and practices that exist within individual organizations or proprietary frameworks, building a consensus around it, and releasing it into a public-domain context.
Once that happens, the value you can get from that approach increases exponentially. Now, you're not talking about going to one vendor and having to deal with one particular set of concepts, and then going to a different vendor and having to deal with another set of concepts, and dealing with the interoperability between those.
You're in a situation where the industry agrees this is the way to do things. Suddenly, the economies of scale that you can get from that, as all the participants in the industry starts to converge on that consensus, mean that you get a whole set of new opportunities about how you can use architecture.
Vendor and technology neutral
Gardner: For those listeners who might not be familiar, The Open Group is a vendor-neutral and technology-neutral consortium. TOGAF, which is The Open Group Architecture Framework, is free in its online form, and there's a charge for the printed version.
About 7,500 individuals currently hold TOGAF certification, which is another important aspect of TOGAF, basically approving that you have the knowledge, experience, and understanding to carry it through. To date, 90,000 copies of TOGAF framework have been downloaded and 20,000 hard copies have been sold.
Let’s go back to Robert Weisman. Let’s look a little deeper at what distinguishes TOGAF 9. We mentioned the modularity. There is also the deeper use of the architecture development method. There is also a bit more inclusive comfort, if you will, with cloud computing and service-oriented architecture (SOA), and thinking more of security, start to finish and holistically. Maybe we could go through a laundry list of what distinguishes TOGAF 9.
Weisman: There are many particular factors. TOGAF 9 is, in certain ways, an evolutionary change and in certain other ways a revolutionary change. The architecture development methodology has basically remained similar. However, transforming the architecture from concept into a reality has basically been expanded pretty dramatically, with a great many lessons learned. So, architecture transformation is a large one. Various architectural frameworks have been incorporated into it.
A great many concepts that allow enterprise architecture to be molded with operations management, with system design, portfolio management, business planning, and the Governance Institute's COBIT guidelines and other industry standards have also been incorporated into TOGAF.
Also, there's been a major contribution by such companies as Capgemini, with respect to artifacts and structure. The content meta model is a huge contribution and as a core contribution, but Mike can elaborate upon that.
Overall, it’s much more extensive and it covers much more of the issues that most CIOs and IT architects have to confront on a daily basis. The nice thing about TOGAF is that you don’t have to use it all. You can use bits of it. You can use a large chunk of it, or you can basically choose to use in its entirety. It’s a very modular and flexible framework that way.
Gardner: As I understand it, with 9 they have made a pathway. If you've already adopted 8, you have a bit of a head start, but you don’t have to have gone to 8 in order to start adopting 9. You can work through different modules and start fresh, which I think is a bit of a departure from the past.
Let’s go over to Mike at Capgemini. Tell us about the meta model, and particularly how the use of repositories for policy driven governance and for the organization of assets across both IT and business become relevant now. [More on how Capgemini views cloud computing.]
Addressing challenges
Turner: If we rewind to TOGAF 8 and talk about some of our experiences using TOGAF 8, that's probably a good way to frame what we've tried to add into TOGAF 9 to address some of those challenges that we have encountered.
TOGAF 8, in our experience, was a very powerful process that you could follow to develop architectures. Where you started to hit limitations with TOGAF 8 was around the work products that you produced as a part of executing the architecture development method.
So TOGAF 8 has a lot of language that talks quite informally about the type of activities that an architect would carry out and the type of work products that they would create.
For example, it discusses creating business scenarios and process models and looking at logical data models and physical data models. There's a lot of language in TOGAF 8 that refers to modeling concepts, but then there is nothing actually in TOGAF 8 that says, "This is what a good deliverable looks like," or "This is actually how you would approach modeling those concepts formally."
What we find are organizations that are using TOGAF 8 effectively have two choices. They can adopt the process and leave the content side of things quite open-ended, or they can adopt the process and select something else to do with the content.
At Capgemini, we had a proprietary internal framework for content prior to TOGAF 9. We did a lot of work taking TOGAF 8 process and Capgemini content framework and putting the two together. We found that to be a really effective combination.
What we also found was that, because of the proprietary nature of the Capgemini framework, it became quite difficult for organizations to adopt that configuration. While we're working entirely within a Capgemini environment and we've got control over the people, the skills, the knowledge, and the approach, that works really well. But, when you're looking at multi-vendor sourcing models or looking at upskilling an end user organization, it becomes a lot more difficult.
What we wanted to do with TOGAF 9 was to address that problem head on and to try to create something equivalent to the Capgemini proprietary framework in a way that allows incremental evolution out of TOGAF 8. We took a lot of the informal concepts that were defined in TOGAF 8 and tried to formalize those around some of our internal thinking for content.
Gardner: What is the upside now, since we've made this transition to 9, for the strategic use of repositories?
Turner: One of the things that we've been working on quite heavily over the past few years is getting the various tool vendors to support the Capgemini framework. We've got quite a long list of tool vendors supporting this framework model. What we are expecting is a small incremental effort for those same vendors to transition and make what are essentially cosmetic changes to be able to support the TOGAF 9 content framework.
Very soon, we'll be in a position where we're looking at a market for enterprise architecture tools, where there is now a level of consensus about how to structure models and how to represent them in a way that didn’t exist before. That can only be a good thing for enterprise repositories, because we're moving closer and closer to that consensus point about how content should be structured.
The problem that we're unable to solve is then to take that model, go one step further, and look at the actual operating model within a particular enterprise, how that enterprise chooses to assign roles and responsibilities for carrying out architecture, and how it chooses to federate governance and those kind of concerns. This is fundamental to how you structure repository, because the repository needs to reflect the partitioning that you actually hold within your organizational structure.
We'll see a big improvement, but it’s not the solution in its entirety.
Gardner: Repositories will include a number of different types of artifacts and services, and each organization will have a unique way of approaching that, given their legacy and their history. We do seem to have reached somewhat of a tipping point in recognizing that to manage complexity, to adopt SOA principles effectively and extend them holistically to start dabbling in cloud computing and take advantage of resources and assets available through that particular model or set of models. Does this increasingly require this organizational framework of repository. Do you agree with that Robert?
Underlying rigor
Weisman: No. I've been an enterprise architect now since 1985, and many of these terms come and go. Underlying it is a certain degree of rigor that the frameworks provide.
It doesn’t matter what environment you go into, but if you have a client with 500 definitions of client, their customers, and you're trying to integrate that to take an overview of the customer throughout goodness knows how many databases, what happens is there is certainly a cogent case for consolidating that.
Many organizations carry orders of magnitude more information than they need. The implications for the information technology infrastructure are immense, and the quality of information because of that is pitiful, not allowing the business executives to make proper decisions.
Whether you do cloud computing or not is immaterial. Whatever paradigm you choose, as long as you apply it in a professional and effective manner, it will work. Trying to use a silver-bullet type of approach and a new name to circumscribe rigorous engineering and professional principles would be a grave error.
Gardner: Okay, fair enough. What is it about TOGAF 9, in particular, that does grease the skids a bit for organizations to better adopt and utilize SOA principles, services like software-as-a-service (SaaS), or infrastructure-as-a-service, what we loosely call cloud nowadays?
Weisman: TOGAF was based on a foundational architecture called the Technical Reference Model, which came out of the U.S. many years ago. It's all service oriented.
The term SOA is old wine in new bottles. It's been around for a long time. If you just have a service catalog, if you have duplicate services, it becomes very evident. That’s one of the advantages of the repositories -- you can have an insight into what you actually have.
TOGAF, from its outset in the early 1990s, has been service oriented for that. Just by applying TOGAF, you have a chance of doing your Gap Analysis, of having the visibility into what you have, which makes it not only efficient, but effective from a business perspective.
Gardner: Anything to offer, Mike?
Two points of view
Turner: When you look at SOA, there are probably two different ways that you can think about IT. One offers quite limited benefits to an organization, and the other offers much greater benefit. At a technical level, there are a bunch of standards and design approaches referred to as SOA, that really deal with standardizing the way the applications talk to one another at a software level.
Implementing SOA in this technical sense isn't necessarily a bad thing, and there are certainly benefits to be had in terms of interoperability at a software level from implementing SOA principles. But, just working at that level on its own is not going to give you any business advantages. It’s just going to make it easier to execute development projects.
The power of thinking about services is much more centered on how you look at your organizational capability and how you can more effectively break down your organization into discrete capabilities that are not replicating the same data, business processes, and IT systems in multiple silos.
If you can have a more granular business organization, where you are replicating capability less, it’s much easier to change more quickly, it’s much easier to use those capabilities to do different things, and you see a step change in the performance of your business.
We need to get those kinds of SOA benefits. The first and most important question to ask is, "What are the services that I need in my business? How should I structure my business to make it meet the goals of the industry?" That may be flexibility, but there are actually some organizations or some parts of your enterprise where you actually don’t desire flexibility. You want stability, cost efficiency, and effectiveness in a much more linear, repeatable sense.
TOGAF allows you to understand what makes your business good and then identify what your services are in a way that considers all the different angles. Once that’s defined, you can then put the right technology underneath that to realize what the business is actually looking for. That’s something that can have an absolutely transformational effect on your business.
Gardner: You mentioned that architecture and SOA by themselves don't necessarily aid a business in achieving its goals, but TOGAF 9 has taken steps over this past five years to increase its relevance to business. Robert, explain how that takes place and what that really means?
Weisman: We're talking about services here. The old TOGAF used to talk in terms of the Technical Reference Model. That's still in 9, but we're looking at business services, as Mike was alluding to. We're looking at rationalizing business services and making sure that they're basically well supported by that.
It also assumes that, when you're doing your preliminary planning, you come up with a framework that recognizes the business operation model within your organization and that you have identified your stakeholders and what they actually want to see in the enterprise architecture framework.
Lack of vision
Most projects fail, because they don’t have proper preliminary planning, and they don’t basically go through the problem. They don’t go through the effort of putting a vision in place. As a consequence, they just jump into the architecture -- usually into the applications and technology architecture -- and they find themselves in trouble very quickly for that. They get a great deal of dissatisfaction.
Outsourcing is an excellent example where a high degree of enterprise architecture maturity correlates to a high degree of satisfaction from both the client and vendor of outsourcing services.
Satisfaction, according to Peter Weill’s book, Enterprise Architecture as Strategy, essentially goes from 50-50 with poorer enterprise architecture maturity to 90-90 with enterprise architecture maturity, and that’s satisfaction both for a client and vendor.
So it ends up being a win-win.
When I talk about outsourced services, they are not necessarily all technology either. They can be business processes that are now being outsourced as well, and it will work its way up the stack.
Gardner: We've talked about architecture as important, of course, but the people who then implement the architecture are quite important. To what degree is certification now a particularly relevant aspect of success in a down economy?
Labor issues and getting good people have been a challenge. There have been significant layoffs, but there has also been an increase in the demand for strong IT to support change in a dynamic business environment. Let’s start with you Robert, the role of certification in the year 2009?
Weisman: First of all, there are two dimensions of certification. For example in The Open Group, you have certification with respect to knowledge of the TOGAF methodology, and then you have IT architecture certification. IT architecture is much broader. It includes business architects and enterprise architects as well, and that takes a look at competencies.
There are no international standards for IT architecture. There are many consultancies that work globally. So, all of a sudden, you're called upon, but this provide a global standard and a global level of confidence with respect to the individuals.
The IT Architect Certification (ITAC) and the IT Services Certification (ITSC) that The Open Group are doing, will provide a level of comfort and assurance to clients that basically they are getting people with a uniform degree of competence.
With respect to the downturn, this is going to become important. Right now, most architects call themselves architects, but there is no international standard against which to measure them. That’s led to a great many architecture failures, which, when you examine them, are not surprising.
Using a standard methodology will also enable RFPs to be written rapidly. What happens is now when you say, "I want a vision as per TOGAF," everybody knows what the baseline is. Then, both suppliers and clients can come up with the assurance, saying, "These guys know what they're talking about," and they can put in a reasonable bid for that.
You're talking about the standardization of product and competencies. This is becoming increasingly important. Globally, there's a huge decrease in enrollment in computer science and computer engineering programs, because of the fact that clients aren’t recognizing these professional designations. Many people say there's no business case in going through an expensive degree program, when you can take a short course and have a very deep but very narrow competency in a particular field?
Certification, both from a competency point of view and from a product point of view, is the wave of the future and extremely important.
Gardner: Mike, how does Capgemini look at the certification process and how important it is for your clients?
Demonstrating capability
Turner: It’s very important, and there are two reasons why. If you look externally in trying to source resources from the market -- whether that’s through a subcontractor or to recruit individuals -- having certification is a good way for candidates to be able to demonstrate that they have reached a level of capability and also for potential employers to put in place a benchmark that filters out the noise.
They can spend much more time looking at individual candidates and assessing them as potential fits to the roles that they're trying to source. I wouldn’t say that certification necessarily guarantees that you get the right person, but it gets you to a short list much quicker.
Gardner: How about practitioners themselves? Is there a significant boost in the pay or ability to find the right jobs as a result of this TOGAF certification?
Turner: If you look at the UK market, there is a correlation between certification and higher pay, but I wouldn’t that that’s the absolute overriding factor.
Another angle to this is, if you look within an organization -- and Capgemini as an organization has a large number of architects, but our client base has architects that work in their organizations -- certification starts to outline a career path for architects within an organization and to allow them to develop themselves and demonstrate that they are improving in capability.
Capgemini has a very active certification program, which we run internally and which is based on experience, engagement, and community. We find that to be a very effective way to build and maintain a community and show professional development and mentoring within our internal environment. That’s something that we help our clients do as well.
Ultimately, architecture is about a network of people. It's about communicating effectively within that network, and then that network having a good face to all the stakeholders for architecture. Having training certification, professional development, and those factors can only be a good thing for building that practice.
Gardner: We're going to be wrapping up in a bit. It’s clearly too soon to look into the future. We just got TOGAF 9 out of the gate. I wonder if there isn’t any extrapolation or looking from the vision point of view where we have come from TOGAF 8 to TOGAF 9, to perhaps give some indication to our listeners as to where TOGAF and enterprise architecture frameworks in general are headed.
Let’s start with you, Robert, for our last question. What can we say, given what we now know about TOGAF 9, as to where the next TOGAF might lead us?
Weisman: There are many working groups right now working on TOGAF, the next generation, whatever it’s going to be called, for example, the Information Architecture Working Group and the like. They've been established and they're looking towards the future and the strategy for that.
Working together
What I see eventually is a lot of these architectural frameworks will start emerging. One of the beauties of TOGAF is that it works very well in conjunction with other architectural frameworks. Let’s say that you're using another architectural framework, which a lot of the industry verticals have. Normally they're model based and TOGAF is mainly process based. They come together, extremely well together, and this is a major strength.
You can’t say, "I'm using this. I can’t use TOGAF." TOGAF will help you deliver the other framework. One of the major issues with many of the other frameworks is that they're wonderfully detailed models, but there is no methodology in place with which to deliver them in a systematic manner. So, I see TOGAF not in terms of an über framework, but certainly a cooperative framework.
It’s also linked with other management frameworks and it’s going to be closer to project management, portfolio management, and the like, which should make it an easier transition. An integrative framework of choice might be a way of describing where TOGAF is going. It's going to be a pointer to other standards and how to integrate them within a company.
We're not there to duplicate the work of other wonderful organizations. It’s how to integrate all the wonderful work, because right now, for executives at the CIO and CEO level, it’s pretty confusing out there.
Gardner: Mike Turner, do you agree on that particular extrapolation in the future of more inclusivity and convergence across business types of frameworks, or are there other future elements of TOGAF we should consider?
Turner: Those are all valid points, and I'd add a few more. One thing we're going to see with TOGAF 9 being available now in the industry is that there would be a reaction to that. A lot of the frameworks and standards that sit around the edge of TOGAF are going to realign slightly to make themselves more consistent with how TOGAF works, which, as Bob mentioned, will help TOGAF integrate some of these different approaches. That will happen without changing TOGAF itself. It would just be that the industry will change to be more aligned around the TOGAF model.
In terms of TOGAF development, there's going to be a big focus on people and organizational aspects within TOGAF, trying to formalize the different skills that are required and the different places where you can use TOGAF within an organization.
Ultimately, that will lead to much greater specialization of the method that we have right now, because we have a single method that applies at a very strategic level and also at a very tactical level. As we understand the organizational context, we can start to be more specific about how the method is applied in different contexts.
Another trend is around the formalization of the specification content. We would expect to see, particularly around a standard for managing this kind of massive information that you are managing semantic content and mature, that TOGAF will start to embrace some of those standards. Looking at formal languages for specifying the methodology and putting the tool set itself within software tools that can be customized and configured is something that we would look to do.
Gardner: Well, that gives us quite a bit to look forward to, some more maturity, even though we have reached a significant milestone in the current level of maturity.
We have been talking about TOGAF 9, its introduction and where its come from and part of its evolution. Our conversation today comes to you through the support of The Open Group, and we are coming to you from the 21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego, in February 2009.
I want to thank our panelists. We have been joined by Robert Weisman, CEO and principal consultant for Build The Vision. Thank you Robert.
Weisman: You're very welcome.
Gardner: Also Mike Turner, enterprise architect at Capgemini. Thanks so much, Mike.
Turner: Thanks.
Gardner: I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to BriefingsDirect. Thanks and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.
Transcript of a podcast on the development of the TOGAF 9 architectural framework, announced at The Open Group's 21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego, February 2009. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.
View more podcasts and resources from The Open Group's recent conferences and TOGAF 9 launch:
The Open Group's CEO Allen Brown interview
Live panel discussion on enterprise architecture trends
Reporting on the TOGAF 9 launch
Panel discussion on security trends and needs
Panel discussion on cloud computing and enterprise architecture
Access the conference proceedings
General TOGAF 9 information
Introduction to TOGAF 9 whitepaper
Whitepaper on migrating from TOGAF 8.1.1 to version 9
TOGAF 9 certification information
TOGAF 9 Commercial Licensing program information
Monday, February 09, 2009
Strong IT Architecture Doubly Important in Tough Economic Times, Says Open Group Expert Panel
Transcript of podcast panel discussion on the role and future of enterprise architecture, recorded at The Open Group's 21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego, Feb. 2, 2009. Special thanks to Paul van der Merwe and Louw Labuschagne of realIRM of South Africa for audience polling features.
Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect. Today we welcome our listeners to a sponsored podcast discussion coming to you from The Open Group's 21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego, Feb. 2, 2009.
This podcast, part of a series on events and major topics at this conference, centers on enterprise architecture (EA), its role in IT and its role in the business. [Read and hear a related interview with The Open Group CEO Allen Brown.]
We're going to look at the value and role of architecture in light of a dynamic business environment. We've seen tremendous change in just a matter of months across the globe. Prices of commodities are going up and down by a factor of 50 percent in a matter of months. This is creating a new dynamic for businesses -- and therefore also for IT departments.
We're going to take a look at why enterprise architecture -- particularly when it's involved or related to service-oriented architecture (SOA), cloud computing, and security -- plays what I think is an extremely important role, and is something that will become more important, not less, in the short-term.
Here to help us weed through the issues of enterprise architecture is our panel. Please welcome Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum. We're also joined by Janine Kemmeren, enterprise architect at Getronics Consulting and chair of the Architecture Forum Strategy Working Group in The Open Group.
We have Chris Forde, vice president and technology integrator at American Express and chair of the Architecture Forum in The Open Group; as well as Jane Varnus, architecture consultant for the enterprise architecture department at the Bank of Montreal, and Henry Peyret, principal analyst at Forrester Research.
We've been hearing an awful lot about TOGAF, and particularly TOGAF 9, but enterprise architecture frameworks are a larger construct, and the relationship between them is something we need to manage. I want to look principally at the relationship between business alignment of IT, business value and outcomes.
My first question goes to Henry. How do EA frameworks generally help businesses align their technology with their dynamic goals?
Henry Peyret: Today, the issue of frameworks is very generalized. They should be customized to fit to the business. I continue to hear that we should align the business with IT, and I think that there is something that is changing currently, where we should synchronize business and IT. That means that we should prepare IT to be not only in line, but synchronized with the business.
What does that mean? That means that the EA framework should be customized and continuously adjusted to the business requirements. That means that sometimes we will collect some artifact and then end the collection of that artifact, because it doesn't mean anything at that point, and we should change to another artifact, which we fit to the new requirements, to the new dynamic.
Gardner: It’s important, of course, for the IT folks to be able to explain the value of architecture, why they need to look across the different aspects of IT, and try to bring a strategic value to them, leveraging such things as TOGAF and other frameworks.
Tony Baer, what are some of the new ways that the IT people need to communicate to the business people, in order to continue to maintain a strategic operative funding?
Value of consistency
Tony Baer: The most important thing, and it's a goal that IT has attained more in the breach, is being consistent. In other words, as opposed to being assigned a project, with maybe 80 percent of the budget you need and 60 percent of the time -- and by the way, the requirements become a moving target -- IT needs a consistent means for translating the undoable to the doable.
This means having consistent process for evaluating the requirements that come in, and evaluating your capabilities, versus what types of regulatory constraints you have, versus -- and here is where the business input comes in -- the speed of change and the velocity of the marketplace.
Without a consistent process, you're going to be reinventing it each time. The most important means for IT to communicate with the business, besides getting to know the business better, is have a consistent process.
Gardner: Chris Forde, there are naysayers nowadays. You can get a lot of hype on just about any side of many arguments. From your perspective, what are the chief components of continuing to invest in architecture, even in a downturn, and what are the paybacks in terms of some of these tremendous shifts, including mergers, acquisitions and consolidations? What are the top three or four rationales?
Chris Forde: The degree of change that we're seeing in the economy and its implications for businesses are -- Nick used the phrase Tsunami during his presentation earlier today -- and that’s really not an understatement. What you have to do is keep your eye on the ball, and the ball is not enterprise architecture. The ball is where the business needs to manage and operate itself effectively.
When the rules change, you can’t just reach back into the same old bag of tricks around architecture. You have to sit down with your partner and say, "Okay, what has changed? Why has it changed, and how do we respond to this?" You need good people with good heads on their shoulders to be able to do that.
Gardner: Let’s take our first question to the audience. They'll see a slide come up with the next question, and that is looking at this impact on the economy, on the whole architecture-IT business alignment set of issues. [Special thanks to Paul van der Merwe and Louw Labuschagne of realIRM of South Africa for audience polling features.]
We're going to be asking you once again to vote with your pads, and the question is: "Does a need for higher general productivity from IT, which loosely means more business value for the same or less money, promote the use of an enterprise architecture framework like TOGAF?"
If you agree, yes; if you disagree, no. Once again, the need for higher general productivity from IT promotes the use of an enterprise architecture framework, yes or no.
While we're tabulating our scores, why don’t we look also at the role of enterprises, and the difference between these various frameworks? There is the Zachman Framework, FEAF, DoDAF, Gartner, and MODAF. I wonder if we need to look at how these relate, rather than how they stand on their own.
Let me take that to Jane Varnus. What is the relationship among these various frameworks, and how should that change in the near term?
Value and history
Jane Varnus: All the frameworks have a valid history and purpose. Every practice has to look at which one is more relevant, both as to its maturity, its goals, and its business, and understand the strengths and appropriateness of the framework they're assessing.
For example, Zachman can be understood and used by inter-practitioners and as a reference point to discuss other frameworks, but none of these are complete. At this point, we're still at an early stage. All the frameworks have value and they all have strengths in different pieces of the workspace.
Gardner: Henry, you said also something around this federation of frameworks.
Peyret: Yes. We just did a survey about framework use in December, and approximately 60 percent of our customers still make their own custom framework. There are more than 40 frameworks available in the market. Why are we still building our own? That’s the main question. Why? Probably because we don't understand what exactly a framework is.
We're able to make a framework to draw broadly across the enterprise. One issue is to take a framework that really fits the enterprise culture. Another also is the maturity of enterprise architecture at the same time.
Just to paraphrase a comment to Jane prior to joining the round table, we've seen a lot of mistakes about choosing those frameworks, because it was chosen only by the enterprise architect. A good framework is one that helps to communicate with the other stakeholders. That means that sharing the same work presentations, the same vocabulary, and the same context. It's absolutely key to choose the right framework.
Gardner: Do you think we're at a point where we need to consolidate, standardize, and reduce the number? What would be the right balance between customization and standardization?
Peyret: I now have more than 10 years in enterprise architecture, and I feel that no one fits every type of enterprise. So, standardizing to only one framework will never happen. I remember a time when I said, "No, the Zachman Framework was not enough, take my own, and I was wrong, and I changed my mind.
Gardner: There you have it. Change is the only constant. Looking now at our first question, not too surprising, given that we have a group of IT architects and planners, 77 percent agree that the need for higher general productivity promotes the use of enterprise architecture.
That’s a pretty strong return on investment (ROI) indicator, when productivity and change are two essential ingredients in normal times, and particularly in a downturn. Only 23 percent disagree with that.
We've talked quite a bit today about business value, the alignment issue between the IT and the outcomes. Our next question is: "Good strategic level IT architecture practices will concretely demonstrate a business value in 12 months or less."
We're looking for a time frame here. How long a term do we need to get for our return on investment?
Please continue to vote, and while you do that we are going to discuss certification, because compliance issues, other concerns about human resources and competency, come to the fore when you have to reduce headcounts. The heads that you keep or you hire have to be extremely good, valuable, capable people.
Let’s take this to Janine Kemmeren. Janine, certification, why is it more important now then ever?
Market demands
Janine Kemmeren: It's now more important than ever because -- and it's a good thing TOGAF 9 has progressed on this -- the market now asks for people who can show that they're capable of doing enterprise architecture.
Gardner: What is the root cause for the rapid increase in certification that we have seen? Is this a function of human resources wanting to see certification before they'll hire, or people recognizing they can increase their value and their career benefit by seeking certification? Any sense of whether this is a supply or a demand function?
Kemmeren: I think it’s both. It’s showing you can do it, and asking people to ensure they can.
Gardner: Let’s take the same question to Chris Forde. Certification, supply and demand, why do you see this as such a skyrocketing aspect of frameworks?
Forde: Certification is a playing-field leveler for organizations, both the consumers and the suppliers. It's somewhere you can apply a rule set and say, "Well, the likelihood that I'm going to get a competent individual is raised, if there are associated standards that are generally accepted and adhered to." Terry talked about this in his presentation earlier today.
To the extent that we have a certification program and a certification body that is credible and is rigorous, you raise the bar for the profession. When you raise the bar for the profession, you get incremental value added over time.
So the certification mechanism for me is a long-term activity. It's not just a snap, and then away we go. We're going to see the benefits of this over the next five to seven years.
Gardner: Tony Baer, governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) are also very important nowadays. The security issue is something that needs to be thought through from beginning to end in a life cycle, not as an add-on or something that you consider as an afterthought. What do you see as the relationship between the certification trend's rapid uptake, and the security and compliance issues?
Baer: I'll give an example that comes out of the software development life cycle. Back when we had mainframe applications or client-server, you didn’t even have a concept of firewall back then. Nothing really went out of the enterprise, except what you communicated, let’s say through EDI.
At that time it was really all about perimeter, but the perimeter was access control. Then, in the early days of the Internet, we started putting in firewalls. You had specialists, and it developed as a branch of facility security.
However today, no matter how secure you try and write your code, there are all these back doors that keep opening up. You see that just from the insane rate of patches that come through almost weekly on browsers or whatever. It’s gotten to the point where, even if we had enough security professionals in the world, there just aren't enough. It's impossible to keep pace with the rate at which holes are opening up.
Design for security
The only thing we can do is borrow a lesson from manufacturing, which is to design for quality, testability, and security. We'll bring this back into certification shortly, but what you're seeing right now in the software tools market, for example, is that developers and testers are having to test their code for security. You can’t just throw it over the wall to the security professionals.
What this really means today is that there isn't a single standard or certification for security. Yes, there are security certifications, but increasingly they are being embedded in the various jobs we perform in the life cycle of developing software.
Gardner: It didn’t seem that long ago when architects didn’t necessarily concern themselves with security. Now, they should, and so they should get certified.
Baer: No question, because basically the dangers have multiplied so much. There is no single class, and besides, it’s not just a matter of perimeter security.
Gardner: The best way for security is to make it a core methodology.
Baer: Embed it. We found it in manufacturing. The Japanese proved it to us with their cars back in the 1980s, designed for quality the first time with no rework. It's much cheaper in the long run, and the car is better in the long run. The same goes for security.
Gardner: Let’s go back to our audience survey. "The impact on business value from good strategic IT architectural practices will concretely demonstrate a business value in 12 months or less."
Fifty-five percent believe that this has a fairly short-term return. That’s encouraging, and 45 percent are saying no -- you either won’t get it at all or it will take longer.
Let’s go to our next question. Get your pads ready. We're going to open up the time frame a little bit. "Good strategic IT architectural practices will concretely demonstrate a business value in 24 months or less." Yes or no?
Let’s see what you think about a longer-term value. Is this something that will have a return if you give it a little bit more time to pay back the practices that you employ, the methods that you learn, and the certification that you hire, when you follow a framework, and when you use context properly. Will that payback in the near term -- a 24-month horizon?
Back to our panel. Let’s move into these newer areas like cloud computing and SOA. These are also under fire. We have heard the possibility of the death of SOA, if you actually say it's SOA, but perhaps it’s still valuable if you call it something else or pretend it’s not a strategic activity and keep it tactical.
Henry, SOA, in the context of good architecture -- why would SOA not be something powerful in today’s change-oriented, cost-conscious environment?
A concept, not a term
Peyret: I disagree with the idea that we should kill SOA. I've heard about that from some colleagues. If you read completely through the article, you see that the term should disappear. I don’t care if it disappears or not. It's a concept. In fact, for me SOA is mainly principles. Many of those principles are good and should continue to develop in fact.
SOA will go to another state, and we don’t care if it changes its name. The goal is to continue to adopt practices, which will help, and to continue to develop more flexible information systems.
Just to come back to one statement about SOA that was very good. We talked previously about value. The problem with value is that today we measure value mainly on productivity. It should be more productive on maintenance, more productive for development, and more productive for many other aspects.
The problem is that we should measure one more value -- particularly on quality -- and I fully agree with you on taking risk, such as adding bad technology at a bad time. We've seen that so many times, such as in adopting client-server.
There is probably another value of good SOA, which is agility. We should measure the way we can deliver faster -- being able to put in place a new application which is complex, embedding BPM, and things like that in less than three months. That’s a good point. We should measure that sort of approach.
That’s a new value that will help to justify EA. At the moment, with more and more governance and more and more committees, we're not bringing any more agility, which will be needed by the dynamic environment.
Gardner: Jane Varnus, from The Bank of Montreal, do you see SOA as something that’s necessarily an all-or-nothing proposition, where you have to have huge up-front capital expenditures and a long-term payback, or is there a crawl, walk, run process here where you can get incremental value?
Varnus: Certainly that’s the approach that has been taken, and it seems our business really depends more on other things. This is a facilitating technology, and we should do exactly as you say -- look at where it will bring value and where the opportunities are to use it for modernizing and making us more flexible. We're not likely to go at this in a "big bang" way.
Gardner: Let’s look at what our audience has to say about the impact of business value and good strategic-level IT architecture.
"Will practices concretely demonstrate a business value in 24 months or less?"
An overwhelming 88 percent says yes; we seem to agree that it’s going to take longer than a year, perhaps around two years, perhaps a little longer, and yet it seems a good investment. Two years to me doesn’t seem too long to ask, given the complexity and the size of the problems that we've inherited over the years and that we're still dealing with.
Let’s key up our next question, while we talk a little more about SOA. The question is: "SOA, as an enterprise IT-wide strategic initiative is dead, because ... ." This is a multiple choice, so feel free to punch any of these numbers:
Let’s continue this discussion among us. Chris Forde, what's your perspective on the SOA payback issue? It seems to me that about a year ago in Texas, we were discussing how enterprise architecture and SOA might, in fact, become conjoined, that we wouldn’t necessarily distinguish SOA, but that it was good architecture. Do you agree with that, or should SOA these days be given a new lease on life?
Transforming the business
Forde: If SOA is aimed at transforming the business and EA is aimed at the same space, then there is a parallel. In some of the debate what we talk about is actually EA, IT architecture, and what we talk about as SOA is really a technical solution looking for a business problem?
So, it depends on a particular organization’s approach to these problems. Services orientation in your architectural approach and in your solution delivery is certainly practicable. Is it scalable across an enterprise, right off the bat? Unlikely.
Gardner: But as we saw with architecture in general, this is one- to two-year concrete demonstrable return.
Forde: I was hoping you would follow up on that point during the audience discussion. It would be interesting to delve into the drivers of what was behind everybody’s response on that two-year cycle. I speculate that the driver is that it can take you maybe three months to six months to carve up a strategic perspective on something.
When you start, if you are starting it at the beginning of your investment cycle for your business, you're in good shape. If you're not, you're going to be out of frame with the business investment cycle. So, the key to working into a 24-month cycle is the probability of the outcome, because you don’t necessarily get to choose when the business or IT wants to get engaged in some strategic activity.
If you've taken a reasonable approach in terms of the architectural assessment, what you have is a roadmap that can be chunked up after that to 12-month, 13-month, 15-month, 18-month, or 24-month increments for delivery. That’s really what the business and technologists are looking for, something that can be dealt with in bite-size choices. The 24-month thing is an interesting idea, but the drivers behind it are more interesting to me. I guess that's my point.
Gardner: Now, we're seeing some interesting results from our audience. They're overwhelmingly coming down on Number 1, that the death of SOA is hogwash. So, perhaps the notion of postponing such things as SOA or strategic architecture, or evaluating and deploying a framework rigorously doesn’t make sense.
It's not something you should postpone, regardless of the business cycle or the economy. That seems to be a takeaway. Do you agree with that, Henry?
Peyret: Despite the economic downturn -- and we don't know when that will end -- we predicted one or two years ago that we should see a new curve of adoption of new technologies, and we talked about dynamic business applications, business process management (BPM), and many other things like that.
Due to social computing and the fact that more people will add new types of collaboration onto Web, they will ask also for some more activity within the enterprise itself. The problem won't be to deliver more solutions in 18 months or 24 months. Perhaps for strategic types of solution, yes; but we should also look at the enterprise architecture level to deliver some solutions for two days, three days, or one week.
Sometimes, obviously, there will be a lot of limitations about quality, security, risk, scalability, and many others things. Our role as an enterprise architect is to allow that.
I know I'm a little bit provocative when I say that. That’s against the governance processes and many other things like that, but if we continue to have the same governance, we have a lot of committees. We did, in fact, because that was painful to establish. The governance process and committees will be fought.
We have seen some customers who fight their committees, just because the governance and committees weren't responsive enough. So, we should find a balance. I recognize that for the moment the downturn is against that balance, but we should see more agility for governance itself.
Gardner: So we have nothing to fear from enterprise architecture and SOA but fear itself? Tony?
Lag and inertia
Baer: I second Henry’s motion. What I think we have to fear is lag and inertia. That’s what we really have to fear.
One of the things I have actually been very cheered about with TOGAF 9 is that it's taken some important steps in the right direction, in terms of making the practice and the learning of enterprise architecture more accessible, and it's modularized things.
There was a discussion briefly at the end of your presentation this morning about, whether we could adapt this for smaller firms and could we implement this "lite." Allen Brown started mentioning that within The Open Group you're taking elements of TOGAF and applying it to a very moderate-size organization.
Those are important starts, but I think we need to do just as the software development world has, in certain areas, embraced Agile development. And, believe me, Agile is not the solution to everything. In the enterprise architecture space, we need to also take a look at what processes can be implemented lightly to take advantage of opportunities that may happen now, but that may totally change in a matter of weeks.
Move the clock back to the beginning of September. It looked like energy prices were still going through the roof. September 15, Lehman fails, and two weeks later, we start to see oil prices declining from $140 a barrel to $35 a barrel. Classic, long lead-time enterprise architecture processes that require two-year paybacks are just not going to make it in that type of scenario.
Gardner: Just to drill down a little bit more on our audience results, we had 63 percent saying that the SOA business is not dead, either tactically or strategically. The number one reason for those who were less optimistic was that, "Tthe business outcomes from holistic SOA are too small and they're hard to define."
That gets back to some of the comments we've heard today. What do we need to take to the business and the bean counters to get them to better understand the value, whether 12 months, 24 months, or at a crawl, walk, run basis? Is it compliance? Is that the rationale?
Is it security or the ability to get future-proofed, so when we do have an opportunity to exploit cloud services, we can do that readily with governance?
We need to give our enterprise architecture practitioners here a little ammunition that they can take back to their business leaders in order to get the buy-in. Everyone is still looking for an answer to that question.
So, we're going to go down our panel and get your best advice. Let us start with you Jane. What is your advice? What should the technologist tell the business leaders to make them better understand the value that we all seem to understand?
Varnus: This is an incredibly challenging question. The thing we can’t do is go back to the business and start talking technology to them. They're not interested in how we support them. What they're interested in is that we should, at a reasonable cost, be reasonably flexible, be absolutely reliable, and be creative. Lag is a big problem. We have to address their concern that we are a partner who is responsive.
So, my short advice is that we have to learn to talk to the business better in their terms, become more tuned in, translate whatever solution we have, and express it back in the terms of that problem. I don’t know what that problem would be in anyone else’s business, but don't mention SOA and don't mention the cloud.
Gardner: The architecture that should not be mentioned. Chris Forde, you mentioned earlier that business alignment is as much about business in business, than it is about business in IT. Is that part of the discussion that we should be having with them?
The right conversation
Forde: Yeah, it is, and it’s a relatively easy conversation to have, as long as the issue isn’t IT, because there are a lot of issues with the way IT operates. But in having a conversation about enterprise architecture and moving the business, I agree with Jane.
We don’t want to have the conversation about architecture. We want to have the conversation about what it is that’s going to make their business more effective. Some of those issues may be inter-business unit related, not specific to IT, and that’s a good conversation to have.
Gardner: Tony Baer, what’s the ammunition that we need to better reinforce the value of investing at the strategic IT architecture level?
Baer: I'd reinforce what Jane was saying. It’s showing consistent results and -- I don’t want to get hung up on the term rapid -- but let’s just say responsive results. It's showing that we're not going to fall into the usual trap of delivering late, over budget and under scope, that IT can be relied upon.
At the end of the day, that’s what enterprise architecture is all about. It's not about devising frameworks. It's about making your performance consistent, rational, and understandable.
Gardner: You are saying, I think, "under promise and over deliver," but is that possible?
Baer: I was saying that the problem that IT has had perennially is that we have over promised, we have under delivered, and we have overcharged. The whole idea of adopting more consistent practices is that hopefully you can avoid having to reinvent the wheel every time and stop making all those damn mistakes.
Gardner: Henry, are we also looking at a continuum here, where we are really only in the early decades of computing at this holistic level in these organizations? Isn’t there a need to look at some sort of Moore’s Law when it comes to IT, that prices will come down, but we have to invest, and that we haven’t gotten maturity yet and we shouldn’t give up.
Peyret: No, we haven't yet come to a maturity at that level, but there's a bigger problem. IT is suffering, and particularly the enterprise architect group, which is more transverse to some lines of business that are not complete today. This is particularly true in the bank industry, but there are some other industries that are also changing. I think that we're going to have a new organizational model. The matrix model is not dead. It's still living, unfortunately, and we're facing a big problem with that.
The problem is that the enterprise architect is trying to solve some of the organizational issues, which have not been solved. We're trying to solve some transverse problem at the enterprise architecture level, when it should have been solved at the business-unit level, by naming one business unit that has had some problems from beginning to end.
Because we have not named those business units to have that new model, which is a network organizational model, the EAs are struggling. A lot of the problem is making the right decision and finding the right owner.
What does that mean for us? That’s challenging for the moment. And, I fully agree. We're not transparent enough to explain to people who are struggling with their own problems that it's not an EA problem. At the same time, we are there to compensate for those problems.
That’s not easy, obviously, and that’s somewhere I have seen a lot of enterprise architect fight, just because they have faced that problem.
Gardner: It seems like there have always been several very good excuses to remain tactical and not get strategic with IT. We just happen to have a big economic excuse right now. But, the longer we postpone, the longer that we resist taking a top-down, holistic, well-thought out, methodological, and standardized perspective, the bigger the problem gets -- and the harder it is to move to that standardized level. Do you agree with that Janine?
Kemmeren: Yes, I do.
Gardner: Is there anything else that you'd offer in terms of how to keep the momentum moving toward strategic IT thinking and planning?
The language of business
Kemmeren: The key in this is not to focus only on technology, but in trying to talk the language of the business, and, in that way, try to get close to the business and understand the problems.
Gardner: What about the business understanding the IT problems?
Kemmeren: That’s a good one.
Gardner: Maybe we're not giving them enough information about what’s really going on in IT!
Kemmeren: I think maybe we're giving them too much information.
Gardner: But, not the right kind of information.
Kemmeren: In the wrong kind of way.
Gardner: What kind of information should we be giving them, Henry?
Peyret: We talk mainly about productivity and costs. When we talk about ROI and cost only, and not risk at the business level, then we lose something. The issue now is to talk more about agility, flexibility, and the capability to shorten the time to market and deliver new products.
During the last decade, we've seen a dramatic change that affected many businesses. It was the capability to take some invention brought by partners, by delivery channels, by new things like those, but assembling them only in terms of capability. We call that the innovation network, and we have seen that network at large, creating a lot of difficulties within different enterprises.
The banking industry, for example, is no longer delivering their own business only through their own internal systems. They're assembling many other external partners. That trend will continue and will grow.
The problem is more about describing those complexities, and it's not about the technology aspect, but more about some business that is booming. The new way to demonstrate value is to explain that we will be able now to make something faster in terms of time to market, time to design, and time to deliver. All of those things are what we call key agility indicators.
It's the flexibility aspect, again, but not the flexibility that every IT provider is talking about. Why? Because they are not defining what type of flexibility they are talking about. We need to specify a key agility indicator at a business level.
We need also to assess our process to say that perhaps we need to deliver that in three months. Unfortunately, our current process and systems are able to deliver that only in five months. How could we shorten that? How could we bring in new practices and new ways to do that, or perhaps a new technology?
Gardner: Tony, earlier you raised the issue of the maturation of manufacturing in the past 40 or 50 years, since World War II as an example of a trajectory for IT. Isn’t that a viable way to explain the difficulties -- that we need to do what you've done with your transportation systems, what you do with your facilities, what you've done with human resources and hiring? There’s been an emphasis on quality, process, and innovation.
Why wouldn’t it make sense to draw that into the IT department to get resources, buy-in, and more SOA?
Baer: I'll start with a very important qualification. We're talking about manufacturing, but we don’t want do what GM has done. What we can learn is the idea of lean, which the Japanese adapted from the doctrine of Juran and Deming, total quality control, lean manufacturing.
Do it right the first time
Gardner: It makes sense to do it right the first time.
Baer: Exactly. In other words, traditional manufacturing relied on rework. We'll just get it out there, and if we need to fix it, we'll just bring it back and fix it. As it turned out, it not only wastes time and money, when you have to fix something that’s already been built, it makes for a poorer quality product.
Gardner: Chris, before we go to the audience for questions, do you have anything to offer in terms of the right messaging, so that business better understands the challenges and requirements of the IT function, and also that the IT people can ascertain from the business side what’s going to be perceived as mission critical and readily backed?
Forde: One thing that's probably going to be useful is a degree of transparency into the IT function. When the business clearly understands what’s driving the quotes coming back to them, they're in a better position to determine what kind of investments they really need to make. In the course of developing that transparency, it causes IT to be more introspective about the way it operates.
There’s a certain set of conversations that needs to occur about how effective the IT operation actually is. This is also in context with other business units. We talk about IT as if it's separate from the business, when, in fact, it's a component of our business operation just like others. It has a certain level of importance and a relationship to certain types of technology, but it isn’t the be all and end all.
We just have to get into a better conversation with the business partners about what’s driving the behaviors in IT, and transparency is one way to do that.
Gardner: I'd like to ask our audience for questions. We've posed questions to you, and now it’s your turn. Raise your hand, and we will get a microphone to you shortly.
But I just wanted to take one last stab here. We need to transform business. We have a very dynamic global, economic environment. We're talking about transforming IT as a lever, as a mechanism to help transform the business. Perhaps we need to transform the dialog between business and IT in order to facilitate some of these other transformations. Henry?
Peyret: As a consequence of some business process orientation, also of the change of the organizational model, and to have a different discussion between IT and business, we'll need to contractualize better and faster between the different parties. I say contractualize, and I know that's probably not the right word about that, but we need to discuss contracts, including internally. The more we go to the next organizational model, the more we will be required to contractualize.
What does that mean? I really believe that it’s the next trend for application adoption, after CRM, ERP, supply chain management, and things like that. It will be about contract management at every level and everywhere. That requires us to develop a contract bus or contract exchange between the different aspects.
The problem with contractualization is that it's very close to the business. It's something that affects everything in the business, but it affects something that is key within each business. There is no a single contract management program out of the box or off the shelf, which will solve all those aspect.
But in that manner we'll be able to become more transparent to the different functions within the enterprise. We'll be able to assemble services very quickly. If we're able to contractualize and take the cost for every one of those contracts, we'll be able to negotiate and have more contracts to deliver from IT to different line of business requirements.
Gardner: This sounds like governance at a business level, but it cuts across all relationships.
Contracts -- the next step
Peyret: Absolutely -- internally and externally, and the external contracts will impact the internal contracts as well. That’s why we need to develop that contractualization all across the different groups. That’s just a next step for the client and customer supplier relationship that we've developed for a decade now. It's just the next step.
Gardner: Thank you very much. We're now happy to take some questions and even observations. If you have a statement that you want to debunk or if you want to reaffirm something, we'd be delighted to hear from you.
Christian Slate: Hi, my name is Christian Slate. I keep hearing people say they're searching for ways of explaining the benefits of enterprise architecture. I usually find that explaining the risks, exploiting the fear factor, the things that can go wrong if you don’t understand your architecture, don’t understand your business, pays off more. Any comments on that?
Gardner: That sounds like, if you think getting an education is expensive, try not getting one. Anybody want to respond?
Varnus: It’s a great idea. At the same time, if you're going to raise a specter of fear you have to know that you can address that and resolve it. That gets us back into the question of having a better understanding on both sides of who owns what. That’s partly coming back to the question of contracts. When you raise fear, you have to understand your capability to deliver as part of the whole organism.
Gardner: Thank you, Jane. Henry?
Peyret: That works very well for some verticals. When you're talking about finance, for example, obviously fear is key. I work for nuclear, and, believe me, that’s also a good point. For some other industries, where they don’t care, absolutely not. So, you have to take care about that approach.
That has some limitation for the time being. It’s more positive to talk about the flexibility aspect, rather than only fear. It's less pessimistic.
Gardner: Thank you. Yes, next question.
Charles Alexi: It’s Charles Alexi from Tonex. I have a question to the audience and maybe to everyone. What we have seen, as a consultant industry, is that the idea of EA is great. No one has any problem with alignment of the business and the IT. But the main issue is that the businesses are also transforming themselves. When we want to align the IT to the business, you need to make IT people become business people, and that’s what they don’t want.
I think the major issue will be really the culture, as you mentioned, and also the issue of a good methodology, because you have now to learn, as IT people, how the business process works. Any comments on that?
Gardner: I think you are saying we need to bring more crass commercialism into the thinking of the IT department.
Forde: There’s a certain degree of discipline that comes out of an IT organization about how to approach things in a certain fashion. Now, that may or may not be a good thing, from a business perspective, but where there’s a high degree of readiness in the IT organization to engage with the business partner, there may be not the same level of readiness on the business side and vice versa.
What I'm suggesting is that the IT folks need to improve their game, relative to understanding their business partners’ issues and context, and vice versa. I think that was the question Dana was asking earlier.
But where we are talking about architecture and change, from a business transformation perspective as well, the opportunity here for us, from an EA framework perspective, is to bring a discipline and a structure that can be transferred out of IT into the business. Now, whether the readiness is there or not on both sides is a different question, but it’s an opportunity for us.
Tom Graves: Hi, Tom Graves. I am really picking up a comment of Jane’s about IT and the focus on the business wanting reliability, rather than just cost cutting. One of the things I'm seeing is that if we become more aware of what the business is looking at, we shift from being a cost center to a profit center, to actually becoming an agility focus for the business.
Are you seeing this happening in your own environments, in your own business? As we become more engaged in the business, we become a partner rather than just simply a supplier, and a not very loved one at that.
Gardner: Alright, how do we become the enabler. Obviously a good question. Maybe too good.
Peyret: That particularly is the case currently in some verticals, where the IT is seen as participating in the innovation and changing the attitude of business. I've seen that in pharmaceuticals. I've seen that also in banks, in some of the banks where they see really the IT as helping the innovation.
Gardner: Well, obviously we know part of our challenge is how to convert ourselves into being perceived differently.
Well, I want to thank our panelists. We have been enjoying the insights of Tony Baer from Ovum; Janine Kemmeren of Getronics Consulting; Chris Forde, American Express; Jane Varnus of the Department of Architecture at the Bank of Montreal, and Henry Peyret of Forrester Research.
I also want to tell you that our conversation today comes to you through the support of The Open Group from the 21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, here in San Diego. I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.
Transcript of a podcast panel discussion on the role and future of enterprise architecture, recorded at The Open Group's 21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego. Special thanks to Paul van der Merwe and Louw Labuschagne of realIRM of South Africa for audience polling features. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.
View more podcasts and resources from The Open Group's recent conferences and TOGAF 9 launch:
The Open Group's CEO Allen Brown interview
Deep dive into TOGAF 9 use benefits
Reporting on the TOGAF 9 launch
Panel discussion on security trends and needs
Panel discussion on cloud computing and enterprise architecture
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General TOGAF 9 information
Introduction to TOGAF 9 whitepaper
Whitepaper on migrating from TOGAF 8.1.1 to version 9
TOGAF 9 certification information
TOGAF 9 Commercial Licensing program information
Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect. Today we welcome our listeners to a sponsored podcast discussion coming to you from The Open Group's 21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego, Feb. 2, 2009.
This podcast, part of a series on events and major topics at this conference, centers on enterprise architecture (EA), its role in IT and its role in the business. [Read and hear a related interview with The Open Group CEO Allen Brown.]
We're going to look at the value and role of architecture in light of a dynamic business environment. We've seen tremendous change in just a matter of months across the globe. Prices of commodities are going up and down by a factor of 50 percent in a matter of months. This is creating a new dynamic for businesses -- and therefore also for IT departments.
We're going to take a look at why enterprise architecture -- particularly when it's involved or related to service-oriented architecture (SOA), cloud computing, and security -- plays what I think is an extremely important role, and is something that will become more important, not less, in the short-term.
Here to help us weed through the issues of enterprise architecture is our panel. Please welcome Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum. We're also joined by Janine Kemmeren, enterprise architect at Getronics Consulting and chair of the Architecture Forum Strategy Working Group in The Open Group.
We have Chris Forde, vice president and technology integrator at American Express and chair of the Architecture Forum in The Open Group; as well as Jane Varnus, architecture consultant for the enterprise architecture department at the Bank of Montreal, and Henry Peyret, principal analyst at Forrester Research.
We've been hearing an awful lot about TOGAF, and particularly TOGAF 9, but enterprise architecture frameworks are a larger construct, and the relationship between them is something we need to manage. I want to look principally at the relationship between business alignment of IT, business value and outcomes.
My first question goes to Henry. How do EA frameworks generally help businesses align their technology with their dynamic goals?
Henry Peyret: Today, the issue of frameworks is very generalized. They should be customized to fit to the business. I continue to hear that we should align the business with IT, and I think that there is something that is changing currently, where we should synchronize business and IT. That means that we should prepare IT to be not only in line, but synchronized with the business.
What does that mean? That means that the EA framework should be customized and continuously adjusted to the business requirements. That means that sometimes we will collect some artifact and then end the collection of that artifact, because it doesn't mean anything at that point, and we should change to another artifact, which we fit to the new requirements, to the new dynamic.
Gardner: It’s important, of course, for the IT folks to be able to explain the value of architecture, why they need to look across the different aspects of IT, and try to bring a strategic value to them, leveraging such things as TOGAF and other frameworks.
Tony Baer, what are some of the new ways that the IT people need to communicate to the business people, in order to continue to maintain a strategic operative funding?
Value of consistency
Tony Baer: The most important thing, and it's a goal that IT has attained more in the breach, is being consistent. In other words, as opposed to being assigned a project, with maybe 80 percent of the budget you need and 60 percent of the time -- and by the way, the requirements become a moving target -- IT needs a consistent means for translating the undoable to the doable.
This means having consistent process for evaluating the requirements that come in, and evaluating your capabilities, versus what types of regulatory constraints you have, versus -- and here is where the business input comes in -- the speed of change and the velocity of the marketplace.
Without a consistent process, you're going to be reinventing it each time. The most important means for IT to communicate with the business, besides getting to know the business better, is have a consistent process.
Gardner: Chris Forde, there are naysayers nowadays. You can get a lot of hype on just about any side of many arguments. From your perspective, what are the chief components of continuing to invest in architecture, even in a downturn, and what are the paybacks in terms of some of these tremendous shifts, including mergers, acquisitions and consolidations? What are the top three or four rationales?
Chris Forde: The degree of change that we're seeing in the economy and its implications for businesses are -- Nick used the phrase Tsunami during his presentation earlier today -- and that’s really not an understatement. What you have to do is keep your eye on the ball, and the ball is not enterprise architecture. The ball is where the business needs to manage and operate itself effectively.
When the rules change, you can’t just reach back into the same old bag of tricks around architecture. You have to sit down with your partner and say, "Okay, what has changed? Why has it changed, and how do we respond to this?" You need good people with good heads on their shoulders to be able to do that.
Gardner: Let’s take our first question to the audience. They'll see a slide come up with the next question, and that is looking at this impact on the economy, on the whole architecture-IT business alignment set of issues. [Special thanks to Paul van der Merwe and Louw Labuschagne of realIRM of South Africa for audience polling features.]
We're going to be asking you once again to vote with your pads, and the question is: "Does a need for higher general productivity from IT, which loosely means more business value for the same or less money, promote the use of an enterprise architecture framework like TOGAF?"
If you agree, yes; if you disagree, no. Once again, the need for higher general productivity from IT promotes the use of an enterprise architecture framework, yes or no.
While we're tabulating our scores, why don’t we look also at the role of enterprises, and the difference between these various frameworks? There is the Zachman Framework, FEAF, DoDAF, Gartner, and MODAF. I wonder if we need to look at how these relate, rather than how they stand on their own.
Let me take that to Jane Varnus. What is the relationship among these various frameworks, and how should that change in the near term?
Value and history
Jane Varnus: All the frameworks have a valid history and purpose. Every practice has to look at which one is more relevant, both as to its maturity, its goals, and its business, and understand the strengths and appropriateness of the framework they're assessing.
For example, Zachman can be understood and used by inter-practitioners and as a reference point to discuss other frameworks, but none of these are complete. At this point, we're still at an early stage. All the frameworks have value and they all have strengths in different pieces of the workspace.
Gardner: Henry, you said also something around this federation of frameworks.
Peyret: Yes. We just did a survey about framework use in December, and approximately 60 percent of our customers still make their own custom framework. There are more than 40 frameworks available in the market. Why are we still building our own? That’s the main question. Why? Probably because we don't understand what exactly a framework is.
We're able to make a framework to draw broadly across the enterprise. One issue is to take a framework that really fits the enterprise culture. Another also is the maturity of enterprise architecture at the same time.
Just to paraphrase a comment to Jane prior to joining the round table, we've seen a lot of mistakes about choosing those frameworks, because it was chosen only by the enterprise architect. A good framework is one that helps to communicate with the other stakeholders. That means that sharing the same work presentations, the same vocabulary, and the same context. It's absolutely key to choose the right framework.
Gardner: Do you think we're at a point where we need to consolidate, standardize, and reduce the number? What would be the right balance between customization and standardization?
Peyret: I now have more than 10 years in enterprise architecture, and I feel that no one fits every type of enterprise. So, standardizing to only one framework will never happen. I remember a time when I said, "No, the Zachman Framework was not enough, take my own, and I was wrong, and I changed my mind.
Gardner: There you have it. Change is the only constant. Looking now at our first question, not too surprising, given that we have a group of IT architects and planners, 77 percent agree that the need for higher general productivity promotes the use of enterprise architecture.
That’s a pretty strong return on investment (ROI) indicator, when productivity and change are two essential ingredients in normal times, and particularly in a downturn. Only 23 percent disagree with that.
We've talked quite a bit today about business value, the alignment issue between the IT and the outcomes. Our next question is: "Good strategic level IT architecture practices will concretely demonstrate a business value in 12 months or less."
We're looking for a time frame here. How long a term do we need to get for our return on investment?
Please continue to vote, and while you do that we are going to discuss certification, because compliance issues, other concerns about human resources and competency, come to the fore when you have to reduce headcounts. The heads that you keep or you hire have to be extremely good, valuable, capable people.
Let’s take this to Janine Kemmeren. Janine, certification, why is it more important now then ever?
Market demands
Janine Kemmeren: It's now more important than ever because -- and it's a good thing TOGAF 9 has progressed on this -- the market now asks for people who can show that they're capable of doing enterprise architecture.
Gardner: What is the root cause for the rapid increase in certification that we have seen? Is this a function of human resources wanting to see certification before they'll hire, or people recognizing they can increase their value and their career benefit by seeking certification? Any sense of whether this is a supply or a demand function?
Kemmeren: I think it’s both. It’s showing you can do it, and asking people to ensure they can.
Gardner: Let’s take the same question to Chris Forde. Certification, supply and demand, why do you see this as such a skyrocketing aspect of frameworks?
Forde: Certification is a playing-field leveler for organizations, both the consumers and the suppliers. It's somewhere you can apply a rule set and say, "Well, the likelihood that I'm going to get a competent individual is raised, if there are associated standards that are generally accepted and adhered to." Terry talked about this in his presentation earlier today.
To the extent that we have a certification program and a certification body that is credible and is rigorous, you raise the bar for the profession. When you raise the bar for the profession, you get incremental value added over time.
So the certification mechanism for me is a long-term activity. It's not just a snap, and then away we go. We're going to see the benefits of this over the next five to seven years.
Gardner: Tony Baer, governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) are also very important nowadays. The security issue is something that needs to be thought through from beginning to end in a life cycle, not as an add-on or something that you consider as an afterthought. What do you see as the relationship between the certification trend's rapid uptake, and the security and compliance issues?
Baer: I'll give an example that comes out of the software development life cycle. Back when we had mainframe applications or client-server, you didn’t even have a concept of firewall back then. Nothing really went out of the enterprise, except what you communicated, let’s say through EDI.
At that time it was really all about perimeter, but the perimeter was access control. Then, in the early days of the Internet, we started putting in firewalls. You had specialists, and it developed as a branch of facility security.
However today, no matter how secure you try and write your code, there are all these back doors that keep opening up. You see that just from the insane rate of patches that come through almost weekly on browsers or whatever. It’s gotten to the point where, even if we had enough security professionals in the world, there just aren't enough. It's impossible to keep pace with the rate at which holes are opening up.
Design for security
The only thing we can do is borrow a lesson from manufacturing, which is to design for quality, testability, and security. We'll bring this back into certification shortly, but what you're seeing right now in the software tools market, for example, is that developers and testers are having to test their code for security. You can’t just throw it over the wall to the security professionals.
What this really means today is that there isn't a single standard or certification for security. Yes, there are security certifications, but increasingly they are being embedded in the various jobs we perform in the life cycle of developing software.
Gardner: It didn’t seem that long ago when architects didn’t necessarily concern themselves with security. Now, they should, and so they should get certified.
Baer: No question, because basically the dangers have multiplied so much. There is no single class, and besides, it’s not just a matter of perimeter security.
Gardner: The best way for security is to make it a core methodology.
Baer: Embed it. We found it in manufacturing. The Japanese proved it to us with their cars back in the 1980s, designed for quality the first time with no rework. It's much cheaper in the long run, and the car is better in the long run. The same goes for security.
Gardner: Let’s go back to our audience survey. "The impact on business value from good strategic IT architectural practices will concretely demonstrate a business value in 12 months or less."
Fifty-five percent believe that this has a fairly short-term return. That’s encouraging, and 45 percent are saying no -- you either won’t get it at all or it will take longer.
Let’s go to our next question. Get your pads ready. We're going to open up the time frame a little bit. "Good strategic IT architectural practices will concretely demonstrate a business value in 24 months or less." Yes or no?
Let’s see what you think about a longer-term value. Is this something that will have a return if you give it a little bit more time to pay back the practices that you employ, the methods that you learn, and the certification that you hire, when you follow a framework, and when you use context properly. Will that payback in the near term -- a 24-month horizon?
Back to our panel. Let’s move into these newer areas like cloud computing and SOA. These are also under fire. We have heard the possibility of the death of SOA, if you actually say it's SOA, but perhaps it’s still valuable if you call it something else or pretend it’s not a strategic activity and keep it tactical.
Henry, SOA, in the context of good architecture -- why would SOA not be something powerful in today’s change-oriented, cost-conscious environment?
A concept, not a term
Peyret: I disagree with the idea that we should kill SOA. I've heard about that from some colleagues. If you read completely through the article, you see that the term should disappear. I don’t care if it disappears or not. It's a concept. In fact, for me SOA is mainly principles. Many of those principles are good and should continue to develop in fact.
SOA will go to another state, and we don’t care if it changes its name. The goal is to continue to adopt practices, which will help, and to continue to develop more flexible information systems.
Just to come back to one statement about SOA that was very good. We talked previously about value. The problem with value is that today we measure value mainly on productivity. It should be more productive on maintenance, more productive for development, and more productive for many other aspects.
The problem is that we should measure one more value -- particularly on quality -- and I fully agree with you on taking risk, such as adding bad technology at a bad time. We've seen that so many times, such as in adopting client-server.
There is probably another value of good SOA, which is agility. We should measure the way we can deliver faster -- being able to put in place a new application which is complex, embedding BPM, and things like that in less than three months. That’s a good point. We should measure that sort of approach.
That’s a new value that will help to justify EA. At the moment, with more and more governance and more and more committees, we're not bringing any more agility, which will be needed by the dynamic environment.
Gardner: Jane Varnus, from The Bank of Montreal, do you see SOA as something that’s necessarily an all-or-nothing proposition, where you have to have huge up-front capital expenditures and a long-term payback, or is there a crawl, walk, run process here where you can get incremental value?
Varnus: Certainly that’s the approach that has been taken, and it seems our business really depends more on other things. This is a facilitating technology, and we should do exactly as you say -- look at where it will bring value and where the opportunities are to use it for modernizing and making us more flexible. We're not likely to go at this in a "big bang" way.
Gardner: Let’s look at what our audience has to say about the impact of business value and good strategic-level IT architecture.
"Will practices concretely demonstrate a business value in 24 months or less?"
An overwhelming 88 percent says yes; we seem to agree that it’s going to take longer than a year, perhaps around two years, perhaps a little longer, and yet it seems a good investment. Two years to me doesn’t seem too long to ask, given the complexity and the size of the problems that we've inherited over the years and that we're still dealing with.
Let’s key up our next question, while we talk a little more about SOA. The question is: "SOA, as an enterprise IT-wide strategic initiative is dead, because ... ." This is a multiple choice, so feel free to punch any of these numbers:
- 1) SOA is not dead, tactically or strategically.
- 2) the business outcomes from holistic SOA are too small and hard to define.
- 3) SOA is too complex and hard to do.
- 4) SOA is too expensive and does not offer concrete return on investment.
- 5) Existing architectures and approaches are good enough.
- 6) Benefits of SOA can be better attained via Web-oriented architecture (WOA), or RESTful, or "webby" means instead.
Let’s continue this discussion among us. Chris Forde, what's your perspective on the SOA payback issue? It seems to me that about a year ago in Texas, we were discussing how enterprise architecture and SOA might, in fact, become conjoined, that we wouldn’t necessarily distinguish SOA, but that it was good architecture. Do you agree with that, or should SOA these days be given a new lease on life?
Transforming the business
Forde: If SOA is aimed at transforming the business and EA is aimed at the same space, then there is a parallel. In some of the debate what we talk about is actually EA, IT architecture, and what we talk about as SOA is really a technical solution looking for a business problem?
So, it depends on a particular organization’s approach to these problems. Services orientation in your architectural approach and in your solution delivery is certainly practicable. Is it scalable across an enterprise, right off the bat? Unlikely.
Gardner: But as we saw with architecture in general, this is one- to two-year concrete demonstrable return.
Forde: I was hoping you would follow up on that point during the audience discussion. It would be interesting to delve into the drivers of what was behind everybody’s response on that two-year cycle. I speculate that the driver is that it can take you maybe three months to six months to carve up a strategic perspective on something.
When you start, if you are starting it at the beginning of your investment cycle for your business, you're in good shape. If you're not, you're going to be out of frame with the business investment cycle. So, the key to working into a 24-month cycle is the probability of the outcome, because you don’t necessarily get to choose when the business or IT wants to get engaged in some strategic activity.
If you've taken a reasonable approach in terms of the architectural assessment, what you have is a roadmap that can be chunked up after that to 12-month, 13-month, 15-month, 18-month, or 24-month increments for delivery. That’s really what the business and technologists are looking for, something that can be dealt with in bite-size choices. The 24-month thing is an interesting idea, but the drivers behind it are more interesting to me. I guess that's my point.
Gardner: Now, we're seeing some interesting results from our audience. They're overwhelmingly coming down on Number 1, that the death of SOA is hogwash. So, perhaps the notion of postponing such things as SOA or strategic architecture, or evaluating and deploying a framework rigorously doesn’t make sense.
It's not something you should postpone, regardless of the business cycle or the economy. That seems to be a takeaway. Do you agree with that, Henry?
Peyret: Despite the economic downturn -- and we don't know when that will end -- we predicted one or two years ago that we should see a new curve of adoption of new technologies, and we talked about dynamic business applications, business process management (BPM), and many other things like that.
Due to social computing and the fact that more people will add new types of collaboration onto Web, they will ask also for some more activity within the enterprise itself. The problem won't be to deliver more solutions in 18 months or 24 months. Perhaps for strategic types of solution, yes; but we should also look at the enterprise architecture level to deliver some solutions for two days, three days, or one week.
Sometimes, obviously, there will be a lot of limitations about quality, security, risk, scalability, and many others things. Our role as an enterprise architect is to allow that.
I know I'm a little bit provocative when I say that. That’s against the governance processes and many other things like that, but if we continue to have the same governance, we have a lot of committees. We did, in fact, because that was painful to establish. The governance process and committees will be fought.
We have seen some customers who fight their committees, just because the governance and committees weren't responsive enough. So, we should find a balance. I recognize that for the moment the downturn is against that balance, but we should see more agility for governance itself.
Gardner: So we have nothing to fear from enterprise architecture and SOA but fear itself? Tony?
Lag and inertia
Baer: I second Henry’s motion. What I think we have to fear is lag and inertia. That’s what we really have to fear.
One of the things I have actually been very cheered about with TOGAF 9 is that it's taken some important steps in the right direction, in terms of making the practice and the learning of enterprise architecture more accessible, and it's modularized things.
There was a discussion briefly at the end of your presentation this morning about, whether we could adapt this for smaller firms and could we implement this "lite." Allen Brown started mentioning that within The Open Group you're taking elements of TOGAF and applying it to a very moderate-size organization.
Those are important starts, but I think we need to do just as the software development world has, in certain areas, embraced Agile development. And, believe me, Agile is not the solution to everything. In the enterprise architecture space, we need to also take a look at what processes can be implemented lightly to take advantage of opportunities that may happen now, but that may totally change in a matter of weeks.
Move the clock back to the beginning of September. It looked like energy prices were still going through the roof. September 15, Lehman fails, and two weeks later, we start to see oil prices declining from $140 a barrel to $35 a barrel. Classic, long lead-time enterprise architecture processes that require two-year paybacks are just not going to make it in that type of scenario.
Gardner: Just to drill down a little bit more on our audience results, we had 63 percent saying that the SOA business is not dead, either tactically or strategically. The number one reason for those who were less optimistic was that, "Tthe business outcomes from holistic SOA are too small and they're hard to define."
That gets back to some of the comments we've heard today. What do we need to take to the business and the bean counters to get them to better understand the value, whether 12 months, 24 months, or at a crawl, walk, run basis? Is it compliance? Is that the rationale?
Is it security or the ability to get future-proofed, so when we do have an opportunity to exploit cloud services, we can do that readily with governance?
We need to give our enterprise architecture practitioners here a little ammunition that they can take back to their business leaders in order to get the buy-in. Everyone is still looking for an answer to that question.
So, we're going to go down our panel and get your best advice. Let us start with you Jane. What is your advice? What should the technologist tell the business leaders to make them better understand the value that we all seem to understand?
Varnus: This is an incredibly challenging question. The thing we can’t do is go back to the business and start talking technology to them. They're not interested in how we support them. What they're interested in is that we should, at a reasonable cost, be reasonably flexible, be absolutely reliable, and be creative. Lag is a big problem. We have to address their concern that we are a partner who is responsive.
So, my short advice is that we have to learn to talk to the business better in their terms, become more tuned in, translate whatever solution we have, and express it back in the terms of that problem. I don’t know what that problem would be in anyone else’s business, but don't mention SOA and don't mention the cloud.
Gardner: The architecture that should not be mentioned. Chris Forde, you mentioned earlier that business alignment is as much about business in business, than it is about business in IT. Is that part of the discussion that we should be having with them?
The right conversation
Forde: Yeah, it is, and it’s a relatively easy conversation to have, as long as the issue isn’t IT, because there are a lot of issues with the way IT operates. But in having a conversation about enterprise architecture and moving the business, I agree with Jane.
We don’t want to have the conversation about architecture. We want to have the conversation about what it is that’s going to make their business more effective. Some of those issues may be inter-business unit related, not specific to IT, and that’s a good conversation to have.
Gardner: Tony Baer, what’s the ammunition that we need to better reinforce the value of investing at the strategic IT architecture level?
Baer: I'd reinforce what Jane was saying. It’s showing consistent results and -- I don’t want to get hung up on the term rapid -- but let’s just say responsive results. It's showing that we're not going to fall into the usual trap of delivering late, over budget and under scope, that IT can be relied upon.
At the end of the day, that’s what enterprise architecture is all about. It's not about devising frameworks. It's about making your performance consistent, rational, and understandable.
Gardner: You are saying, I think, "under promise and over deliver," but is that possible?
Baer: I was saying that the problem that IT has had perennially is that we have over promised, we have under delivered, and we have overcharged. The whole idea of adopting more consistent practices is that hopefully you can avoid having to reinvent the wheel every time and stop making all those damn mistakes.
Gardner: Henry, are we also looking at a continuum here, where we are really only in the early decades of computing at this holistic level in these organizations? Isn’t there a need to look at some sort of Moore’s Law when it comes to IT, that prices will come down, but we have to invest, and that we haven’t gotten maturity yet and we shouldn’t give up.
Peyret: No, we haven't yet come to a maturity at that level, but there's a bigger problem. IT is suffering, and particularly the enterprise architect group, which is more transverse to some lines of business that are not complete today. This is particularly true in the bank industry, but there are some other industries that are also changing. I think that we're going to have a new organizational model. The matrix model is not dead. It's still living, unfortunately, and we're facing a big problem with that.
The problem is that the enterprise architect is trying to solve some of the organizational issues, which have not been solved. We're trying to solve some transverse problem at the enterprise architecture level, when it should have been solved at the business-unit level, by naming one business unit that has had some problems from beginning to end.
Because we have not named those business units to have that new model, which is a network organizational model, the EAs are struggling. A lot of the problem is making the right decision and finding the right owner.
What does that mean for us? That’s challenging for the moment. And, I fully agree. We're not transparent enough to explain to people who are struggling with their own problems that it's not an EA problem. At the same time, we are there to compensate for those problems.
That’s not easy, obviously, and that’s somewhere I have seen a lot of enterprise architect fight, just because they have faced that problem.
Gardner: It seems like there have always been several very good excuses to remain tactical and not get strategic with IT. We just happen to have a big economic excuse right now. But, the longer we postpone, the longer that we resist taking a top-down, holistic, well-thought out, methodological, and standardized perspective, the bigger the problem gets -- and the harder it is to move to that standardized level. Do you agree with that Janine?
Kemmeren: Yes, I do.
Gardner: Is there anything else that you'd offer in terms of how to keep the momentum moving toward strategic IT thinking and planning?
The language of business
Kemmeren: The key in this is not to focus only on technology, but in trying to talk the language of the business, and, in that way, try to get close to the business and understand the problems.
Gardner: What about the business understanding the IT problems?
Kemmeren: That’s a good one.
Gardner: Maybe we're not giving them enough information about what’s really going on in IT!
Kemmeren: I think maybe we're giving them too much information.
Gardner: But, not the right kind of information.
Kemmeren: In the wrong kind of way.
Gardner: What kind of information should we be giving them, Henry?
Peyret: We talk mainly about productivity and costs. When we talk about ROI and cost only, and not risk at the business level, then we lose something. The issue now is to talk more about agility, flexibility, and the capability to shorten the time to market and deliver new products.
During the last decade, we've seen a dramatic change that affected many businesses. It was the capability to take some invention brought by partners, by delivery channels, by new things like those, but assembling them only in terms of capability. We call that the innovation network, and we have seen that network at large, creating a lot of difficulties within different enterprises.
The banking industry, for example, is no longer delivering their own business only through their own internal systems. They're assembling many other external partners. That trend will continue and will grow.
The problem is more about describing those complexities, and it's not about the technology aspect, but more about some business that is booming. The new way to demonstrate value is to explain that we will be able now to make something faster in terms of time to market, time to design, and time to deliver. All of those things are what we call key agility indicators.
It's the flexibility aspect, again, but not the flexibility that every IT provider is talking about. Why? Because they are not defining what type of flexibility they are talking about. We need to specify a key agility indicator at a business level.
We need also to assess our process to say that perhaps we need to deliver that in three months. Unfortunately, our current process and systems are able to deliver that only in five months. How could we shorten that? How could we bring in new practices and new ways to do that, or perhaps a new technology?
Gardner: Tony, earlier you raised the issue of the maturation of manufacturing in the past 40 or 50 years, since World War II as an example of a trajectory for IT. Isn’t that a viable way to explain the difficulties -- that we need to do what you've done with your transportation systems, what you do with your facilities, what you've done with human resources and hiring? There’s been an emphasis on quality, process, and innovation.
Why wouldn’t it make sense to draw that into the IT department to get resources, buy-in, and more SOA?
Baer: I'll start with a very important qualification. We're talking about manufacturing, but we don’t want do what GM has done. What we can learn is the idea of lean, which the Japanese adapted from the doctrine of Juran and Deming, total quality control, lean manufacturing.
Do it right the first time
Gardner: It makes sense to do it right the first time.
Baer: Exactly. In other words, traditional manufacturing relied on rework. We'll just get it out there, and if we need to fix it, we'll just bring it back and fix it. As it turned out, it not only wastes time and money, when you have to fix something that’s already been built, it makes for a poorer quality product.
Gardner: Chris, before we go to the audience for questions, do you have anything to offer in terms of the right messaging, so that business better understands the challenges and requirements of the IT function, and also that the IT people can ascertain from the business side what’s going to be perceived as mission critical and readily backed?
Forde: One thing that's probably going to be useful is a degree of transparency into the IT function. When the business clearly understands what’s driving the quotes coming back to them, they're in a better position to determine what kind of investments they really need to make. In the course of developing that transparency, it causes IT to be more introspective about the way it operates.
There’s a certain set of conversations that needs to occur about how effective the IT operation actually is. This is also in context with other business units. We talk about IT as if it's separate from the business, when, in fact, it's a component of our business operation just like others. It has a certain level of importance and a relationship to certain types of technology, but it isn’t the be all and end all.
We just have to get into a better conversation with the business partners about what’s driving the behaviors in IT, and transparency is one way to do that.
Gardner: I'd like to ask our audience for questions. We've posed questions to you, and now it’s your turn. Raise your hand, and we will get a microphone to you shortly.
But I just wanted to take one last stab here. We need to transform business. We have a very dynamic global, economic environment. We're talking about transforming IT as a lever, as a mechanism to help transform the business. Perhaps we need to transform the dialog between business and IT in order to facilitate some of these other transformations. Henry?
Peyret: As a consequence of some business process orientation, also of the change of the organizational model, and to have a different discussion between IT and business, we'll need to contractualize better and faster between the different parties. I say contractualize, and I know that's probably not the right word about that, but we need to discuss contracts, including internally. The more we go to the next organizational model, the more we will be required to contractualize.
What does that mean? I really believe that it’s the next trend for application adoption, after CRM, ERP, supply chain management, and things like that. It will be about contract management at every level and everywhere. That requires us to develop a contract bus or contract exchange between the different aspects.
The problem with contractualization is that it's very close to the business. It's something that affects everything in the business, but it affects something that is key within each business. There is no a single contract management program out of the box or off the shelf, which will solve all those aspect.
But in that manner we'll be able to become more transparent to the different functions within the enterprise. We'll be able to assemble services very quickly. If we're able to contractualize and take the cost for every one of those contracts, we'll be able to negotiate and have more contracts to deliver from IT to different line of business requirements.
Gardner: This sounds like governance at a business level, but it cuts across all relationships.
Contracts -- the next step
Peyret: Absolutely -- internally and externally, and the external contracts will impact the internal contracts as well. That’s why we need to develop that contractualization all across the different groups. That’s just a next step for the client and customer supplier relationship that we've developed for a decade now. It's just the next step.
Gardner: Thank you very much. We're now happy to take some questions and even observations. If you have a statement that you want to debunk or if you want to reaffirm something, we'd be delighted to hear from you.
Christian Slate: Hi, my name is Christian Slate. I keep hearing people say they're searching for ways of explaining the benefits of enterprise architecture. I usually find that explaining the risks, exploiting the fear factor, the things that can go wrong if you don’t understand your architecture, don’t understand your business, pays off more. Any comments on that?
Gardner: That sounds like, if you think getting an education is expensive, try not getting one. Anybody want to respond?
Varnus: It’s a great idea. At the same time, if you're going to raise a specter of fear you have to know that you can address that and resolve it. That gets us back into the question of having a better understanding on both sides of who owns what. That’s partly coming back to the question of contracts. When you raise fear, you have to understand your capability to deliver as part of the whole organism.
Gardner: Thank you, Jane. Henry?
Peyret: That works very well for some verticals. When you're talking about finance, for example, obviously fear is key. I work for nuclear, and, believe me, that’s also a good point. For some other industries, where they don’t care, absolutely not. So, you have to take care about that approach.
That has some limitation for the time being. It’s more positive to talk about the flexibility aspect, rather than only fear. It's less pessimistic.
Gardner: Thank you. Yes, next question.
Charles Alexi: It’s Charles Alexi from Tonex. I have a question to the audience and maybe to everyone. What we have seen, as a consultant industry, is that the idea of EA is great. No one has any problem with alignment of the business and the IT. But the main issue is that the businesses are also transforming themselves. When we want to align the IT to the business, you need to make IT people become business people, and that’s what they don’t want.
I think the major issue will be really the culture, as you mentioned, and also the issue of a good methodology, because you have now to learn, as IT people, how the business process works. Any comments on that?
Gardner: I think you are saying we need to bring more crass commercialism into the thinking of the IT department.
Forde: There’s a certain degree of discipline that comes out of an IT organization about how to approach things in a certain fashion. Now, that may or may not be a good thing, from a business perspective, but where there’s a high degree of readiness in the IT organization to engage with the business partner, there may be not the same level of readiness on the business side and vice versa.
What I'm suggesting is that the IT folks need to improve their game, relative to understanding their business partners’ issues and context, and vice versa. I think that was the question Dana was asking earlier.
But where we are talking about architecture and change, from a business transformation perspective as well, the opportunity here for us, from an EA framework perspective, is to bring a discipline and a structure that can be transferred out of IT into the business. Now, whether the readiness is there or not on both sides is a different question, but it’s an opportunity for us.
Tom Graves: Hi, Tom Graves. I am really picking up a comment of Jane’s about IT and the focus on the business wanting reliability, rather than just cost cutting. One of the things I'm seeing is that if we become more aware of what the business is looking at, we shift from being a cost center to a profit center, to actually becoming an agility focus for the business.
Are you seeing this happening in your own environments, in your own business? As we become more engaged in the business, we become a partner rather than just simply a supplier, and a not very loved one at that.
Gardner: Alright, how do we become the enabler. Obviously a good question. Maybe too good.
Peyret: That particularly is the case currently in some verticals, where the IT is seen as participating in the innovation and changing the attitude of business. I've seen that in pharmaceuticals. I've seen that also in banks, in some of the banks where they see really the IT as helping the innovation.
Gardner: Well, obviously we know part of our challenge is how to convert ourselves into being perceived differently.
Well, I want to thank our panelists. We have been enjoying the insights of Tony Baer from Ovum; Janine Kemmeren of Getronics Consulting; Chris Forde, American Express; Jane Varnus of the Department of Architecture at the Bank of Montreal, and Henry Peyret of Forrester Research.
I also want to tell you that our conversation today comes to you through the support of The Open Group from the 21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, here in San Diego. I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.
Transcript of a podcast panel discussion on the role and future of enterprise architecture, recorded at The Open Group's 21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego. Special thanks to Paul van der Merwe and Louw Labuschagne of realIRM of South Africa for audience polling features. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.
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