Archive 2005 - 2007
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The articles page is updated on a weekly
basis. If you missed one last week, or you simply would like
to read some of the articles we have featured in the past, you can find
them all here in the archives.
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Alternatively click
here
to return to this week's articles.
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Please be aware that the article links on
this page were correct at the time of original publication.
Unfortunately we are unable to ensure that all past articles remain
accessible and therefore apologise for any broken links that you might
find on this page.
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Monday 24th December 2007
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Web2.0 has certainly been one of the hot topics
for everyone this year. However, it's not just being used for positive
benefit. Already malware attacks that exploit Web2.0 technologies and
the social patterns of behaviour with this sort of technology are
emerging. To make matters worse, it seems that most IT security
capabilities have nothing in place to counter this new breed of
security threat. |
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An outlook from some CIOs on the 2008 IT budgets. |
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A
discussion of SOA governance, comparing the organisational and cultural
challenges faced with those encountered when the concept of shared
corporate databases was first introduced. In most cases, the idea of
shared databases failed to gain traction with internal project delivery
teams and so what lessons can be learnt for those looking to introduce
shared services. |
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This
annual report looks at the challenges that CIO's have faced during 2007
and what lies ahead for 2008. |
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Monday 17th December
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A discussion of a report's findings that 43% of
managers treat poor performance by IT projects as the norm. |
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Monday 10th December
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An outline of some approaches currently being
taken to incorporating consumer technologies into the corporate
enterprise. |
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A discussion of the changing roles in the IT
industry, particularly that of the CIO. |
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If
your SOA is to be effective, you need to govern the services and the
'service infrastructure' that they operate in. Using policies to
control the use of services at both design and more importantly
run-time is key to delivering the governance that you require, as this
animation describes. |
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Monday 3rd December
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The final part of the integration series looks
at the biggest blunders that are made when attempting to implement SOA. |
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This article discusses an number of strategies
for addressing complexity within an IT architecture. |
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How
do you measure the success of your SOA initiative? This short article
explores looking at the backlog of IT requests as a metric. Companies
that are implementing SOA are seeing drastic reductions in the overall
backlog of IT requests. Although this demonstrates how the agility of
SOA can pay back in after you've implemented it, this won't help in
creating the ROI for your business case to invest in SOA. A more
sophisticated approach is required to build a the ROI. At EAS, we've
found that measuring the number of consumers for each service is a good
way to establish the level of sharing that is going on. The
functionality that is being provided by each service and being shared
by the consumers is now only developed and maintained in one place -
making significant savings during and after project implementation.
This kind of "sharing analysis" could provide a good basis for the
pro-active metrics that this article calls for. |
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Monday 26th November
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A discussion of the role that enterprise
architecture can play in managing the removal of IT assets when
adopting IT portfolio management practices. |
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A good article on how EA teams have gained
acceptance and credibility within some organisations. The line, 'But
now architects take a more active role, often leading major initiatives
such as SOA implementations', fits with our view that architects often
have to demonstrate EA from a delivery-based role to engage the
organisation. |
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When
thinking about Service Orchestration in an SOA, it is important to
separate the concepts of Service and Orchestration. The Service
provides - well, the service - and the Orchestration is the 'process'
layer that strings together the services in a way that supports the
business. |
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The
third part of this series about integration, looks at the key skills
that will be needed by organisations. |
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Monday 19th November
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A look at how to implement integration systems
to improve both efficiency and data accuracy. |
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Microsoft has recently revealed that it has made
a series of technical investments in order to help empower developers
to exploit SOA. These investments, codenamed 'Oslo' will play out
across five different routes including, a server based on Biztalk; a
set of software infrastructure services such as Identity Management and
Workflow functionality to enable composite application development; and
the .NET framework. It seems like Microsoft has many of the components
that are required to deliver a complete SOA, but more work is likely to
be required to pull these together into a coherent set of tools to
deliver the required SOA infrastructure. |
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This
article uses a fictitious company to illustrate the benefits of
aligning an SOA initiative with Project Portfolio Management (PPM)
practices. |
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This
blog entry from infoworld.com provides an interesting viewpoint,
including a lot of points with which we'd agree - although some are
quite bleak - along with some contentious statements. |
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Monday 12th November
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A view that the majority of EA initiatives have
failed with some reasons why. Most of this is aligned to our view of
EA: that initiatives that follow the theoretical EA approach will
struggle, whilst ones that are fully engaged and take a more practical
approach are usually successful. |
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This article describes the key components that
are required in order to gain sustainable benefit from SOA. |
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Businesses
are exploring the use of virtual worlds for collaboration, training and
a host of other 3D web applications. Virtual environments such as
SecondLife are gaining traction and could prove to be the future of
teleconferencing, as some companies in this article demonstrate. |
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The
first part of a four-week series on integration, which looks at the
advances in technology that should help organisations to connect their
systems. |
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Monday 5th November
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Through the bold use of agile IT techniques,
Lean Principles and a Service Oriented Architecture, Standard Life has
emerged as one of the stars of the pensions sector. The agile approach
to IT is enabling agility of the business. |
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Enterprise architecture is not a project or a
campaign rolled out to satisfy short-term tactical requirements.
Rather, it is a new, coordinated way of running the business. Some
thoughtful views, although the statement that 'TOGAF certification is
critical for any organisation or person keen on pursuing enterprise
architecture' is very arguable. We've seen several good EA programmes
that don’t use TOGAF at all. |
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This
article describes some of the key factors that organisations need to
consider when embarking on a journey of achieving and maintaining
Business/IT alignment. |
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This
article identifies two companies that have not followed the usual route
but ended with a successful SOA implementation, highlighting the need
to take your business needs into account when planning your
implementation. |
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Monday 29th October
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Enterprise Architecture is uniquely positioned
to provide a key input into an enterprise's outsourcing decisions. As
we have described in our white paper 'A Service Oriented Approach to
Architecture Modelling' (see Whitepapers on the menu to the left),
using a service oriented approach can enable the identification of
well-defined boundaries for areas that are to be outsourced. In
addition, this approach provides a well-defined set of capabilities
that define the requirements for the outsourcing suppliers. This
article explores how with a service-oriented focus and an understanding
of the sourcing decision life cycle, the EA team can lead to more
strategic sourcing decisions and better integration between the EA and
IT operations teams.. |
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Summary of a conference presentation that talked
about Web 2.0, it's ability to support business opportunities quickly
and the role of IT. |
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This
article summarises the findings and the lessons learned from a case
study of the implementation of Enterprise Architecture at a
multi-national airline company. |
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Monday 22nd October
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This article provides a management overview of
SOA, including background and definitions. It goes on to identify the
issues that are commonly faced and has practical suggestions for
overcoming them. |
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What technologies should we be looking out for
in the year ahead? |
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Companies
that are focusing on service-oriented architecture (SOA) are
out-performing those that are simply deploying web services, according
to new research. This should come as no surprise, however. Despite
having the benefits of hindsight for all the previous 'remote component
invocation' technologies such as CORBA, DCE, DCOM etc., Web Services is
a technology for enabling the communication of remote components. It
provides no structure for the form that these components should take.
Companies that fail to focus on the architecture - in particular the
definition of true Services - may gain some tactical benefits from
using Web Services technologies in terms of technical interoperability
but are just building another Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)
environment not an SOA. |
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A
short but useful view on SOA; what it is and what it requires to be a
success. |
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Monday 15th October
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IT professionals' failure to clearly communicate
technology risks leaves boards ill-informed to make decisions,
according to a new report. Having said this, it is not a
straightforward between the technology assets and components used by an
enterprise and the business processes that they support. It's very
difficult for any individual to clearly understand the top-to-bottom,
across the board dependencies between technology and the business which
would enable them to communicate the risks. However, applying
Enterprise Architecture practices, in particular, capturing an accurate
model of the dependencies and relationships between business processes
and technology components - and also between technology components -
this complex picture can be brought together and examined from a
variety of perspectives (business, IT etc.) to establish what the IT
risks may be. |
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This article looks at a new piece of research
that helps correlate IT spend with business value accrued. |
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This
blog article outlines the key lessons learned by British Telecom over
their six years of experience of building their service-oriented
architecture. |
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A
view from an experienced IT professional that compares SOA to some
previous IT trends and questions whether or not we should get too
excited over SOA. |
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Monday 8th October
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This article discusses the goals and
accomplishments of both the CIO and COO at Microsoft, as they strived
to achieve operational excellence.. |
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A discussion of users' views of the benefits and
the drawbacks of SOA, suggesting some tips for success with SOA. |
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Things
have changed since the days when those of us in Enterprise Architecture
spent a lot of time explaining what EA is. Across the business, EA is
becoming much more widely recognised and is being driven by 10 factors
that present significant challenges for enterprise architecture that
must be address in 2007. Architects must consider the entire enterprise
from a holistic perspective from business through to infrastructure and
including external factors if they are to successfully address these
challenges. |
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Monday 1st October
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This article covers a list of questions that
should be asked if a CXO is to have confidence that their software
architecture is robust enough to support their objectives. |
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The virtualisation revolution has begun. More
and more organisations are seeing and exploiting the benefits of
virtual server technology as an alternative approach to consolidating
the massive sprawl of commodity Intel-based servers within their data
centre. Over the next decade, the Intel and AMD will play out a race to
provide the best hardware platform for virtualisation, taking different
routes that may be advantageous to certain types of application. Those
responsible for hardware platform architectures should keep
an eye on this. Ultimately, though, the time will come when we should
no longer be differentiating between virtualised server platforms and
the mainframe. There will be no differentiation. |
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This
article discusses the important role that IT architecture will play in
the future of the financial services industry. |
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Monday 24th September
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As organisations improve the perimeter security
of their networks, the biggest most common attacks are now coming from
within the firewall. More and more browser users are being tricked into
clicking on links that will start some form of malware attack. The
solution? Stop people clicking on things that they shouldn't. |
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This article suggests that over the next 10
years IT departments will move to an ‘IT Lite’ operation, with key IT
staff, and CIO’s in particular needing more commercial and business
skills and less technical skills, which will be provided by key
outsource organisations. The key will be to understanding the critical
business elements that will need to remain in house. |
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This
recent entry on David Linthicum's blog about SOA explores the fact that
some enterprise architects don't really understand SOA. |
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Monday 17th September
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An interesting read on how Barclays built a
platform for growth and has transformed itself since 2003. |
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CIO’s are challenged to keep up with changing
business needs. This article suggests that, with current CIO tenures
being only 38 months on average, a new breed of CIO is required, and
soon. |
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The
following article describes a service-oriented, customer-driven
approach to IT governance and some key questions that should be
answered when putting this approach in place. |
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The
business solutions that we put together are getting more and more
complex - especially as look to take advantage of and integrate
existing systems. This can often mean that maintaining the correct
levels of security across these complex, distributed environments
becomes very difficult. This article presents ten "tell-tale" phrases
that if you hear in your organisation, could be a sign that there maybe
trouble ahead. |
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Monday 10th September
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This article suggests that although many
companies feel that IT is of strategic importance, few feel that that
the risks associated with IT are communicated to them in a way that
they can understand. |
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An analysis of a report which discusses whether
Enterprise Architecture and Agile Methods are compatible or not. |
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This
is a Q&A interview with Andy Baer, the CIO of Comcast in the
US, who provides insight into the approach his company has taken to
delivering SOA and the real, business benefits they have achieved. |
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Despite
being heralded as the end of lengthy travel to business meetings, video
conferencing has consistently failed to gain proper traction.
Technology has certainly improved over the years, although each new
step forward seems to be introduced with a "now it's ready"
announcement. However, it seems that finally video conferencing is
starting to deliver real benefits for organisations - indeed it's
something that we at EAS make extensive use of. As this article
explains, there are still some meetings that have to be had
face-to-face but telepresence capabilities such as telephone or video
conferencing can work really well for meetings between groups that are
either internal to the organisation or where the group has already met
face-to-face and know each other already. |
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Monday 3rd September
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This article provides a brief, high-level
definition of the role of Enterprise Architect. Why does an
organisation need one? How should an organisation go about recruiting
Enterprise Architects? |
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The business solutions that we put together are
getting more and more complex - especially as we look to take advantage
of and integrate existing systems. This can often mean that maintaining
the correct levels of security across these complex, distributed
environments becomes very difficult. This article presents ten
"tell-tale" phrases that if you hear in your organisation, could be a
sign that there maybe trouble ahead. |
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This
are article takes a look at how some organisations are approaching the
implementation of Web 2.0 technologies - and how they addressed ROI. |
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This
article looks at whether a top down or a bottom up approach for SOA
design is most successful - specifically when designing SOA
solutions that include existing mainframe assets. |
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Monday 13th August
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FiXs, a little-known federation of
not-for-profits, government contractors, commercial entities and
government agencies has unveiled the infrastructure for a universal
identity system that could eventually be implemented nationally or
internationally. Of course, identity is an emotive topic and while
there appear to be few technical challenges for FiXs, getting the
public comfortable with this sort of identity infrastructure will not
be straightforward. |
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This
PDF, 'Return on Investment for Composite Applications and Service
Oriented Architectures: A Model for Financial Success and Enterprise
Efficiency', discusses the ROI for SOA from a number of different
perspectives. |
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Monday 6th August
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The CTO position has been adopted by many
organisations in a wide range of industries who want to manage how
technology is exploited in their company. The position calls for an
operational executive who can make important strategic decisions that
will impact the competitive position of the company. However, across
the wide range of organisations who have appointed a CTO, there is an
equally wide range of responsibilities that these CTOs have. Little
research has been done to define what this role should be about and the
skills that are required. This paper identifies five dominant patterns
that seem to have emerged. |
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Business process re-design requires both IT and
business involvement but, crucially, also needs direct executive
involvement. |
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Innovation
doesn't just happen. it comes from carefully tending to creative teams.
Failing to do so can squash ideas and affect the growth of an
organisation. This article presents some opinions on how companies can
stifle innovation. |
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Monday 30th July
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This article describes the need for change in an
organisation’s business model as well as change in IT, if the benefits
of SOA are to be realised. |
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Two
different perspectives on whether you should outsource and hope that
inefficient processes get fixed as part of the solution, or fix them
before you outsource them. |
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Monday 23rd July
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The thought of tackling a service oriented
architecture (SOA) can be intimidating but, as Air France shows, the
rewards are worth it. |
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Around 35% of organisations around the world are
using ITIL for IT service management. However, lack of interest from
the business can be a limiting factor in the adoption of ITIL. This is
a common issue for any initiative that affects the way IT will be
delivered to the business, such as a Strategic Architecture. A new
version of ITIL attempts to resolve this issue by defining the links to
the business. Similarly, to deliver a Strategic Architecture,
Architecture Governance is key in defining how the business an IT
interact such that the Strategic Architecture is incorporated into how
solutions are delivered and managed. |
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This
is a link to a website that provides brief summaries of large range of
management methods, models and theories. It includes summaries on
several hundred approaches including the value disciplines, balanced
scorecard, RACI, etc. |
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Monday 16th July
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"If you don't drive the architecture out of the
business strategy and respond specifically to the strategic imperatives
of your organization, then you're probably not delivering value to the
business, " Gartner Research Director Anne Lapkin observes. Indeed,
without a clear understanding of these, how do you know what
architectural decisions to make about things like information,
applications and technology? This article and the linked podcast
describe approaches for creating the business context for your
architecture, some best practice and a look at the role of BPM in
enterprise architecture. |
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A recent study shows that most UK business
leaders are embracing IT, and those that do are reporting improved
business growth. |
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The
CTO of the US Department of Defense Business Mission Area describes how
the DoD is migrating to its target state architecture. |
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A
discussion of the different approaches to addressing data integration
issues that can arise when implementing an SOA. |
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Monday 9th July
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This PDF document describes a test that has been
developed by MIT to provide a measurement of how IT savvy an
organisation is. |
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A look at one IT worker's conversion to SOA
after his realisation that it is not just a strategic tool, but one
which can simply make day to day work easier. |
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This
article discusses and compares the role of enterprise architect against
the emerging role of SOA architect. |
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Monday 2nd July
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Use of Business Process Management (BPM) for
enterprise-wide solutions in a production environment is still very
much the territory of early adopters. Organisations are finding that
employing SOA to expose application functionality, enabling this to be
'orchestrated' in line with the organisation's processes, has proved
very valuable. A strong commitment to the underlying technology of both
the business applications and the integration technology is a major
component of success with BPM. |
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It seems that everyone is going wild about SOA
at the moment. However, as this article shows, while there are a lot of
services - in one form or another - being created, many people seem to
be missing that the 'A' in SOA is for architecture. |
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How
structured should Enterprise 2.0 be? A view and some questions about
introducing Enterprise 2.0 to the organization. |
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Monday 25th June
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A discussion of some of the reasons for varied
uptake of SOA across organisations, in particular, the difficulty that
both IT teams and product vendors alike are having in getting the SOA
message across to the business. |
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Many vendors of SOA infrastructure software are
now tending to package-up everything (and anything) into large SOA
Suites. While it's great to get everything you might need all fitting
together (they do fit together, right?) does this lead us back to
vendor-lock in? Perhaps new, "hosted SOA" approaches could provide a
credible alternative to the Big SOA suites by offering flexibility and
agility without as much lock-in. |
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A
six-step guide to help you decide when it is best to build your own app
and when you can re-use an existing app from either within your
organisation or externally. |
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Monday 18th June
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What are the challenges for organisations as
they try to embrace and gain from Web2.0 tools such as wikis, blogs and
social networking sites? |
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There's been some heated debate about whether
Service Component Architecture leads to vendor lock-in. The stated
objective of SCA is about providing a model for component assembly in
order to build services. What's wrong with that? It comes down to where
these components that you've assembled have to run. Is SCA still in
line with SOA if the services you've built all have to run on a single
vendor's SCA container? |
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This
article recommends a number of steps that organizations should
undertake to establish enterprise-level data governance to ensure
consistency in the protection of data and overall data quality. |
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SOA
has won many coverts but this article questions whether they realise
that the expected ROI is unlikely to be seen for many years yet –
possible not until 2012. Additionally, success is proving harder than
anticipated and this article looks at the many theories as to why this
is so. |
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Monday 11th June
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A discussion of the techniques that should be
used for building an SOA capability - with a lot of useful information
and advice. |
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An interesting review of a new book by Geoffrey
Moore. Companies must understand where they need to innovate in order
to survive - merely investing heavily in being 'best in class' will not
bring success. |
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This
article examines the link between Business Process Management (BPM) and
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in delivering alignment between IT
and the business. |
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Monday 4th June
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A look at how and why NASA uses open-source
software for some of its projects. |
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Model-based management of IT infrastructure is
the future of infrastructure management technology. By analysing in
near-real time the infrastructure management data, the signatures of
possible failures are recognised and can be matched to the appropriate
response automatically. Modelling of the infrastructure makes it
simpler to capture the complex relationships and dependencies between
infrastructure resource. |
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This
article provides advice on how organizations can achieve greater
IT/business alignment. Initially, with a tactical focus and then moving
through to strategic alignment and finally providing real business
value through innovation.. |
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Monday 28th May
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This article is one of a series that takes a
stage by stage view of the tasks that are involved in delivering SOA.
This particular section takes a step back from discussing SOA from a
technical perspective, encouraging a business process-driven view of
SOA. |
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What can organisations do to ensure close
alignment of business and IT? The demands for increased responsiveness
to change in the business are threatening to strain alignment and widen
any gap between business and IT. A look at the forces for alignment. |
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How
can technology support business growth in the financial sector? With a
look at the role SOA can play. |
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Monday 21st May
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Some hints and tips on how an organisation
should go about developing an Enterprise Architecture competency, based
upon the experiences of a number of company CIOs. |
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|
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Decision makers should trust 'hard analytics'
and forget gut-feeling. 'Data-driven' organisations are barely making
any wrong moves as the progress through turbulent markets -
demonstrating the capabilities of 'hard analytics'. |
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Is
the latest TLA indeed essential technology or just the latest IT trend? |
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A
view on how companies will build evolvable systems using a combination
of existing technologies, tools and web services rather than the static
systems that have been typically built to date. |
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back to top
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Monday 14th May
|
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|
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A discussion of the disconnect that has occurred
between business and IT and suggests that Business Architecture may
provide the resolution. |
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|
|
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A series of questions that IT can ask of the
business for the purpose of enterprise architecture and IT strategy
planning. The article is targeted at IT Strategy Planners and
Enterprise Architects of entrepreneurial organisations moving to a more
managed IT model, however, it is equally applicable to any organisation
that lacks a well-defined, published business strategy. |
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|
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An
interview with the CTO of LloydsTSB on their approach to EA and how it
is supporting both growth and cost efficiency. |
|
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|
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A
view of how EA has evolved - suggesting that that is now into Business
Intelligence for IT organisations. It's important to realise that this
is just one of the ways in which EA can help any organisation. A better
and more complete understanding of how the organisation works and the
dependencies between the elements of that organisation is vital for
managing change in the enterprise - whether IT change or business
change. |
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back to top
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Monday 7th May
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Of the six dimensions to a CIO's capability,
it's the fourth that's all-important in changing the perception of IT
within the enterprise. Delivering against this is the way to gain the
attention of well-placed senior executives and enable the CIO to
breakthrough any frustrating "glass ceilings". |
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This describes the reasons for the recent growth
in EA as a discipline and the qualities that an Enterprise Architect
requires today in order to deliver the expected benefits.. |
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This
article looks at a couple of approaches to project metrics. These
approaches are relevant to Enterprise Architecture (EA) initiatives and
in turn, the EA outputs created should provide elements which input
into the project metrics. |
|
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From
its spec-sheet, Oracle's SOA Suite 10g includes a comprehensive pack of
technology components for delivering the infrastructure required to
develop, execute and manage a Web Service-based SOA. Using Web Services
doesn't necessarily realise an SOA and this article provides a detailed
review of this suite of tools. |
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back to top
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Monday 30th April
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So many BI projects fail because they are
sponsored by IT. This article looks at why this is the case and
suggests that they should very definitely be business led. |
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This article reintroduces the concept of
Information Resource Management (IRM) and discusses the reasons why,
historically, IRM failed to gain traction and reap the desired
benefits. Although the author does not explicitly refer to Enterprise
Architecture, many of the challenges he associates with IRM can be
recognised in relation to introducing EA practices into an organisation. |
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Reusing
services is cost effective. However, business and technical components
both affect the ROI for SOA and each business function and process must
be carefully analysed in order to create the right services. We've
found that the ability to share such services provides an invaluable
guideline to defining and refining them, having first taken the
"traditional" approach of encapsulating the behaviour. This article
looks at three topics to consider when calculating the ROI for SOA. |
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This
article presents the view that, based on current trends and the fact
that there have been a large number of successes, SOA use in critical
applications is increasing. |
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back to top
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Monday 23rd April
|
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|
|
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New research claims that PowerPoint is a waste
of time. This article - and the comments made about it - provides some
very useful pointers for improving your presentations. |
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|
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An exploration into the importance of
Information Strategy in ensuring that your organisation’s data is
clean, consistent and available in a timely manner to both the business
processes and the users that require it. |
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This
blog is in line with our view of architecture and the role of
frameworks. i.e. EA is an interactive joint business/IT initiative and
frameworks are merely one tool that support initiative, they are not
the solution to EA.. |
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Monday 16th April
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OASIS, the international standards organisation,
has announced a new initiative to advance standards that simplify the
development of applications based on Service Oriented Architecture. |
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A look at the role of governance in delivering a
true enterprise level SOA which also describes different levels of SOA
governance that can exist, together with the challenges associated with
each of these levels. For example, business units will inevitably take
the cheapest option for themselves when developing solutions which
often this opposes the strategic goal of reuse, and centralised
efficiency. |
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With
technology expertise allied to business savvy, the Enterprise
Architects of today are connecting silos (both technology and
functional) and providing the vision across the enterprise. |
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Monday 2nd April
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|
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Achieving competitive advantage is one of the
major reasons for initiating business change. This article explores how
examining business change from the perspective of competitive advantage
can provide useful guidance. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is uniquely
positioned to coordinate the strategy and planning across a full
spectrum of competitive advantage opportunities. |
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OASIS are expected to approve BPEL 2.0 this
week. This article looks at what this major update to the Web Services
Business Process Execution Language will mean for Web Service
technology in particular and SOA in general. |
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|
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This
article provides some insights on how CIOs and CTOs see SOA. What is
clear is that the thinking is at a business level rather than a
technology level, which is good to see. |
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Monday 26th March
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Advice, war stories and pointers from early
adopters of SOA. |
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Business Architecture: Leveraged in IT Strategic
Planning – according to this article we should not be aligning IT with
the business, but realising that IT is an integral part of the business. |
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A
description of how techniques traditionally used for measuring the
performance and quality of service provided by IT systems, can be
applied up the stack to better understand the impact that IT is having
in improving business process performance. |
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Awareness
of the environmental impacts of power consumption is increasing leading
to legislation to encourage enterprises to save energy. However,
business leaders cannot expect a strategy of expecting technology
infrastructure vendors to solve all the environmental issues to work.
Those organisations that embrace the problem are more likely to find a
way to leap ahead of their competitors. |
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back to top
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Monday 19th March
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This article discusses the benefits of
collaboration for, not only within the organisation, but also
cross-organisation. |
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|
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This article describes how IT Steering
Committees can be an effective means of achieving Business/IT
alignment, with the appropriate composition and remit. |
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|
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Review
of a top 10 technology projects survey and some views on timelines,
challenges and benefits. |
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A
look at the myths the must be dispelled in around the drivers for
success in the not-for-profit and government world. However, many of
these myths can also be observed in the private sector. Whatever the
sector, the use of strategy-driven business metrics is required to
drive out these myths. |
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back to top
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Monday 12th March
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How are you managing the complexity of your IT
environment? This article discusses how to use Enterprise Architecture
to combat increasing IT complexity. |
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An IT Director talks about his approach to
building a credible IT organisation. It doesn't mention an Enterprise
Architecture explicitly, but the concepts talked about are essentially
elements of or linkages into a good EA. |
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Everyone
is being told that they need to be "doing EA". The problem is that
there are so many interpretations of what "doing EA" means. Let's take
a step back and look at why EA is important and having understood that,
start thinking about what it is that one should be doing. |
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Will
SOA help or hinder the alignment of business and IT? The following
article asks this essential question and discusses the potential impact
that SOA might have on organisations’ attempts to align their business
and IT. |
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back to top
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Monday 5th March
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Is your business using technology efficiently?
This article takes a look at some different approaches that a number of
companies have taken to aligning business and IT across their
enterprise. |
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The complexity of any change is the main
battleground for most CIOs. This user panel report looks at some views
and opinions from CIOs on the challenges of managing the complexity
created by business change and technology developments. |
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|
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There
appears to be a chasm forming between traditional enterprise
architecture people and those looking at the value of SOA, according to
this report. What are the issues behind this gap? |
|
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Apparently,
the tide has shifted in open source software's favour, according to
this article. Proprietary vendors can sometimes react badly to losing
out to open source. However, is this because the software is open
source, or is it because open source vendors are willing to publish
free-to-download versions of their products for customers who are
engaged in an RFP to try out and answer many of the questions
themselves? |
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back to top
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Monday 26th February
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| |
This article reports on a census by CIO
Connect on the actions CIOs and the business in general
should take to control projects. |
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As Google continue to add to their impressive
portfolio of applications, this article asks where this is leading to.
Can you imagine an IT environment without any applications to roll out?
Google has plans to conquer the enterprise and is no longer just a
search company. Little by little, their applications are being
increasingly used in many organisations and is pioneering a new
approach to enterprise computing. |
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A
recent survey finds that fears about cost and disruption from the
introduction of new technology are the key concerns. As with any change
programme, though, without a clear understanding of the dependencies
between technology, applications and business processes across the
enterprise, the extent of the costs and the disruption cannot be
accurately estimated. It is difficult to gain the required level of
understanding in any organisation. The systems - the processes,
applications and the technology underpinning these - have dependencies
that rapidly become complex, even for the simplest organisations. A
focussed approach to enterprise architecture is crucial to cut through
the complexity and gain this understanding. |
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Monday 19th February
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Why is Software as a Service becoming
increasingly attractive to organisations of all sizes? Smaller
organisations have been quick to embrace this idea - and have been for
some years - especially for costly services such as EDI. However, as
the uptake of solutions such as SalesForce.com are showing, it's not
just those organisations who cannot justify or afford large IT systems
for non-differentiating, standard processes that are looking to use
SaaS for the 'commodity systems'. This article looks at the drivers
that are leading organisations of all sizes to this way. |
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|
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This article suggests that many of the top
performing companies are those that base their decision making on
concrete information and do not rely on instinct. It goes on to predict
that most companies will follow suit and will improve their use of
information and analytics. |
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|
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This
article discusses the impact that consumer-led IT will have on an
organisation’s ability to control and manage their IT landscape. |
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back to top
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Monday 12th February
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Few doubt the positive impact to the
organisation that an enterprise architecture programme can bring - in
theory. However, very many enterprises struggle to gain these benefits.
Why is this? Often too much attention is paid to the execution - in
particular selecting modelling tools and creating models - and not
enough on the people that are involved in the programme. How do you put
together the right team for your Enterprise Architecture program? This
article examines approaches for how to build and manage a virtual
Enterprise Architecture team. |
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|
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As companies seek more and better ideas, CIOs
have an excellent opportunity to bring innovation to the organisation
by reinventing the process. By enabling people to collaborate, IT can
become an engine for the growth of the organisation. |
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|
|
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Creating
an SOA takes a lot more than simply implementing the latest software
infrastructure. This article describes some of the organisational and
cultural changes that are required to successfully evolve an enterprise
SOA. |
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back to top
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Monday 5th February
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|
|
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The internet continues to change previously-held
wisdom about how business is conducted. In his new book, The
Long Tail, Chris Anderson explores how internet commerce is
changing existing market models by providing access to a far greater
list of choices for things than has been possible through traditional
markets. |
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This article discusses how having good quality
data is a key pre-requisite to SOA and goes on to describe a suggested
set of processes and platform requirements for addressing this issue. |
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|
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As
SOA adoption grows, the development of bespoke software by internal
teams will grow in importance. Some companies are turning to SOA while
others are biding their time. Some analysts believe the differentiator
between these organisation lies in the complexity of their
infrastructure. |
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This article
discusses how, although there is typically no vision and there are many
different interpretations of what it means, companies are implementing
elements required to support the SOA both implicitly and explicitly. |
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back to top
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Monday 29th January
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|
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As the UK Government announces plans for a
single, integrated, huge database of personal details, this article
questions the approach, in particular the apparent lack of
architecture. Without proper architectural input, guidance and advice -
including taking a service oriented approach - this article questions
how 'joined up' government can be realised. |
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This article suggests that there are three types
of IT organisation, and the key to ensuring alignment to the business
is knowing the type of organisation you are, and should be. |
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|
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A
good article that covers how success in delivering SOA usually needs a
more pragmatic approach where the objectives are limited but the gains
visible. |
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back to top
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Monday 22nd January
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Collaboration
is crucial if an EA initiative is to be successful, however it easier
to say than to do. This article gives a number of tips that will help
build effective alliances throughout an organisation and enable
effective collaboration. |
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|
|
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This
article discusses how some companies are considering bringing
outsourced services in-house and describes a number of other models
that are being considered. |
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As
enterprises
embrace and focus much attention on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
to improve the flexibility and agility of their business applications,
it will be important to consider the impact of user interface (UI)
technology. Improvements to the user interfaces of the enterprise
applications can also increase productivity of the workforce. UIs will
draw on users' experience of both consumer devices and consumer
software to increase their familiarity with the enterprise application
interfaces. This article looks at 8 new trends in UI technology that
will shape the user interfaces of future enterprise systems. |
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|
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XML appliances
are becoming
a major part of integration solutions deployed by many organisations as
part of a SOA initiative. Loose coupling, high performance, scalability
and security are just a few of the benefits of these hardware based
solutions described in this article. |
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|
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This article
provides
evidence of business/IT alignment reaping tangible ROI and describes
the approaches a number of organisations have taken to achieving it. |
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back to top
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Monday 15th January
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|
Many
organisations have some experience of open source technology.
Typically, early forays into open source include mid-range Java
Application Servers, such as JBoss or relational database like MySQL.
Increasingly, open source technology is being installed "under the
covers" and relied upon by enterprises even though they may not be
aware of it. Many software vendors exploit open source such as Tomcat,
JBoss and SAP's MaxDB is in fact MySQL. However, organisations still
have concerns about open source. What is the reality? This article
discusses how open source is ready for the enterprise and is now beyond
free-stuff. |
|
|
|
|
In
this article,
the author suggests that BI (Business Intelligence) and BPM (Business
Process Management) are unlikely to ever converge but instead will
become complementary disciplines. |
|
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|
Computing’s view on what the main IT issues will
be in 2007
|
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|
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|
The concept
behind SOA is
the best-of-breed approach at a finer level of granularity: linking the
best general ledger, the best payables package and so on, for example,
to end up owning a superior system with none of the compromises
packaged systems always entail. The author here calls this a "false
nirvana," and certainly no packaged applications killer. The
integration work, finger pointing and, most important, risk that the
components won't work together as advertised will keep applications
companies in business. |
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back to top
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Monday 8th January 2007
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This
report discusses the effects of information overload on managers. |
|
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|
Despite
the
“anti-hype” in the latter part of 2006, SOA is still a big
topic for many organisations. This blogger highlights some of the
factors that will ensure SOA remains in the headlines for the coming
year. |
|
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|
This article discusses some of the reasons why
organisations’ IT Strategies fail to meet their objectives
together with some approaches for addressing the many potential
pitfalls.
|
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SOA described
using the analogy of Lego. |
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back to top
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Monday 25th December 2006
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Whether
we like
it or not we face a wealth of techno-babble on a daily basis, and we
have the likes of Thomas Eddison and Monty Python to thank for it. This
is a light-hearted take on the history of IT jargon, the mess it gets
us into and what’s being done to cure the inflicted! |
|
|
|
|
Christopher
Koch writes about the divide between IT and Business people and puts it
all down to our similarity to apes… |
|
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|
Many organisations have some experience of open
source
technology. Typically, early forays into open source include mid-range
Java Application Servers, such as JBoss or relational database like
MySQL. Increasingly, open source technology is being installed "under
the covers" and relied upon by enterprises even though they may not be
aware of it. Many software vendors exploit open source such as Tomcat,
JBoss and SAP's MaxDB is in fact MySQL. However, organisations still
have concerns about open source. What is the reality? This article
discusses how open source is ready for the enterprise and is now beyond
free-stuff.
|
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|
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|
This article
discusses the
benefits and issues associated with the choices that many CIOs are
currently facing when deciding the long term future of the IT
department within their organisations. |
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|
|
|
Views from
Silicon.com's CIO
Jury on how the amount of data being generated today can be
overwhelming and some of the challenges. |
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back to top
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Monday 18th December
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|
This
article
describes the challenges and suggests approaches for maintaining a
"single version of the truth" at the enterprise level for business
information. |
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Views
and opinions on EA from a CIO council discussing what a successful EA
team should do to be a success for the CIO |
|
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|
This article suggests that companies are turning
away
from IT cost savings and now, seeing IT as an enabler of the business,
are looking to change the focus to how infrastructure can help revenue
growth, beat competition and improve service levels.
|
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|
|
|
Tibco’s vice
president
of SOA discusses a number of interesting insights on service-oriented
architecture, highlighting the fact that organisations are starting to
realise SOA cannot simply be purchased off the shelf. He suggests that
there are many technical and cultural challenges ahead, but with the
right approach, companies really can start to acquire the process and
technical agility that has been promised so many times in the past. |
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|
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|
Althought the
term AJAX is
about two years old now, some of the major commercial AJAX tools
vendors have been building their toolkits for building interfaces that
are deployed to Javascript for more than five years. Such tools are
easily described as mature and even established and this review of four
of the leading products finds sophisticated, rich IDEs for developing
AJAX solutions. |
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back to top
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Monday 11th December
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|
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|
Discusses
the
output from a couple of MIT studies which identified four distinct
architectural stages — silos, standardized IT, standardized
business processes, and business modularity—that both the
business units and IT must pass through before SOA's benefits can be
fully realized. |
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If
SOA is
failing to gain traction within your organisation then there is a good
chance that it’s being undersold. SOA as a concept is difficult
to argue against; so long as you understand it. With the IT industry
putting forward so many varying definitions for SOA, it is
understandable that the business is not exactly chomping at the bit.
Focusing on the bottom line and expalining the difference SOA will make
to business agility are among the key selling points highlighted in
this article. |
|
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|
What new strategies are being devised for using
Business
Intelligence tools and techniques to exploit organisations' data for
corporate decision making? One Forrester Research's principal analysts
talks about his view of Business Intelligence (BI), in terms of the
classes of BI application, how BI functionality can and should be
delivered and what software vendors are doing to support the analysis
of both structured and unstructured data.
|
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|
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|
This article
outlines the
critical role that SOA has in the future of enterprise information
management. In particular, master data management in support of
business intelligence activities. |
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back to top
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Monday 4th December
|
|
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|
This
is an
editorial from CIO.com on how CIOs are under pressure to deliver growth
while tightly managing costs. Something which is not that simple to do. |
|
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|
What
can IT
directors and CIOs do to improve how IT departments are managed? As a
young but maturing industry, the emphasis is moving towards people and
away from the machines; this change requires a different style of
leadership. Executive director of IT services at Stanford University,
William Clebsch provides an insight into how to create IT leadership in
organisations. |
|
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|
Many analysts are not now predicting the slow down
in
the economy that was previously expected, and therefore the reduction
in IT budgets may not materialise. However, CIOs should be cautious as
economists are expecting a slow down in corporate profit growth and in
some industries this can be linked directly to IT budgets.
|
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|
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|
Implementing a
SOA requires
a level of application integration that is often unthinkable in a
traditional environment with a large volume of legacy systems. This
article suggests that SOA may not be the answer to technological
efficiency, but a way of improving business services and processes. |
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back to top
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Monday 27th November
|
|
|
|
|
If
it sounds too
good to be true, then it probably is! Many technology vendors are
promoting their tools (once again) as the answer to software re-use.
This blogger suggests that whilst the ability to wrap legacy systems
and expose functionality as a re-useable service is certainly a major
plus, organisations need to think carefully about just how this service
architecture evolves over time in order to avoid building yet another
spaghetti mess of not-quite-so-re-usable services! |
|
|
|
|
This
articles discusses five actions that implementers of SOAs should take
in order to help ensure the success. |
|
|
|
|
We are at a point in the evolution of the
Enterprise
Architecture discipline where the architectural processes, tool
capability and business requirement and political desire are combining
to enable EA to become a fundamental part of managing the strategy of
the enterprise. Many organisations have failed to deliver the benefits
of EA to the business - often by trying to deliver too much at once.
Success with EA requires an emphasis on why you're using EA - what
information does the business need? - not on the tools and frameworks
that support the capture of the architecture. The right language for
capturing and articulating your architecture across the organisation is
a fundamental part of providing that required information to the
business. This language is defined and managed by its meta model and
must be able to adapt to include new concepts as the EA expands to
cover new business requirements. As this article recommends, meta data
strategies are very important in managing the focussed development and
growth of your EA, ensuring that the business gets the information that
it needs without having to 'boil the ocean'.
|
| |
|
|
|
This article
describes the
concept of ‘Business Process Fusion’ as a means of
achieving both of what many see as competing objectives; business
efficiency and business agility. |
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back to top
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Monday 20th November
|
|
|
|
|
Improving
data
quality is not just about making sure the data that goes into a system
is correct. Factors such as reducing the number of places where
duplicate data is managed, and establishing a consistent way of
describing data (meta-data) also have important roles to play.
Understanding the meaning of data and developing systems that manage
data consistently can often fail at the first hurdle as arguments arise
over how to define fundamental organisational concepts - such as
“Customer” (Customer can take on many different meanings
depending on who you are in the organisation). This article even goes
so far as to suggest that the process of establishing an agreed
meta-data can be so difficult that if a company can tolerate the bad
condition its data is in, don’t try to fix it! |
|
|
|
|
Discusses
some
views from Cutter on how IT can engage the business by using terms they
understand, e.g. Return on Investment, differentiation |
|
|
|
|
This article examines the divide between IT and
the
Business, which has often been to blame for project failures, and has
fostered a lack of trust between the two. Many companies are now
looking to place IT staff directly in the business as a solution to
this problem.
|
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|
|
|
The world is
going wild for
service-oriented, or at least it should be according to analysts and IT
vendors alike. However, there are truly a wealth of benefits for
tackling the increasingly tricky-to-manage complexity of modern
business systems. And this complexity will continue to get worse. Which
of the two main service-initiatives should we be backing - Service
Oriented Architecture (SOA) or Software as a Service (SaaS)? Are they
just different perspectives on the same thing? Although both take a
service oriented approach, how they are realised may differ greatly -
and this difference could lead to parallel service-oriented worlds that
will add to the complexity rather than combining and pulling together
to deliver the promises of a service oriented enterprise architecture. |
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Monday 13th November
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This
article
suggests that Business ProcessManagement initiatives can benefit by
being IT led and that this, in turn, can be an enabler for SOA. |
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Argues
that
process modeling shouldn’t be done for process modeling’s
sake. Instead, the focus should be where real value can be derived. For
example, when implementing new applications, it suggests that people
should utilize standard out-of-the box processes where possible and
focus the process modeling on areas where true differentiation is
possible. |
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Many people, it seems, still confuse SOA (Service
Oriented Architecture) with Web Services technology. While Web Services
provide an excellent technology platform that has benefited from the
experience of many attempts to implement SOAs with a variety of
technologies, building Web Service-based systems does not necessarily
mean that you're building SOA systems. In EAS, we have a lot of
experience of implementing SOAs using CORBA, Java and also Web Service
technologies and despite the much-discussed XML and HTTP issues of Web
Services, for many applications the tooling and the loosely-coupled
model of Web Service technology quickly out-weighs any performance
implications. Indeed, many of these XML-processing issues can be
addressed, if required, by XML accelerator technology such as XML
appliances.
What about those applications that require very high performance, such
as some banking and telecoms systems? Implementing such applications
using SOA need not imply or require the use of SOAP, HTTP and other Web
Service technologies. It is the 'Architecture' in SOA that is important
not the technology. This article reviews this problem and potential
approaches for providing solutions to delivering SOA in a
high-performance environment.
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This article is
an overview
of the principles and goals of Enterprise Architecture in modern
strategic business planning by providing illustrations based upon a
‘Zachmann-style’ framework. |
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With so much
talk of wikis
being the next best thing for enterprise collaboration, this article
provides a brief history of the wiki and introduces some of the many
innovative ways they are being put to use in industry. |
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Monday 6th November
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Howard
Dresner,
who coined the term "business intelligence" in 1989, takes a look back
at how the practice has evolved over time and discusses some of the
cultural stumbling blocks that many organisations are still facing. |
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This
article
discusses the differences between SaaS and SOA and discusses whether
they are complimentary or conflicting disciplines. |
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SAP have announced their plans to create what they
call
a Business Process Platform from their NetWeaver technology. The
objective of this is to provide an environment where business processes
can be defined and executed in Information Technology supported by
SAP's enterprise SOA. Reading between the lines, the goal of this
approach seems to be to enable the definition and executing of business
processes that flow together Service invocations - whether to automate
process steps or to interact with human participants. This approach,
which forms part of what we at EAS call a Service Oriented Enterprise
(SOE), in which the entire enterprise is modelled and operates as a
collection of services and events, depends heavily on having the right
service design and a completely service-oriented approach to how the
business systems provide the functionality of the services.
SAP see the approach where an organisation's software is assembled from
small, discrete components (in this case the services) as the basis for
applying industrial manufacturing methods to software development. The
assembly of components compared to bespoke crafting of products. The
challenge for SAP is not when they will deliver this technology but how
they move their existing software products to deliver the right
components that enable organisations to rapidly assemble the software
that they need for both non-differentiating, core business processes
and the novel business processes that provide competitive edge.
|
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Good article
discussing the need to build effective governance frameworks for SOA
with some examples of successes and failures. |
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Monday 30th October
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This
article
discusses how ultimately, an organisation is merely a set of processes
that involve people, machines and the marketplace at large. The
companies that stay for the long term tend to pay close attention to
their processes, continually analysing and improving them. |
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Is
SOA sliding
into the “trough of disillusionment”? Enthusiasm for SOA is
being dampened as suppliers and analysts squabble over what SOA really
means and what technology is required to compose and manage services
effectively. According to Gartner this is a common and frustating phase
for any new technology, where disillusionment sets in before the real
benefits are finally realised. |
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Managing
semantics in
application integration has always been a key issue. In the world of
SOA, managing the semantics is a fundamental part of achieving the
benefits of taking a Service Oriented approach. Ensuring that the
meaning of information is well understood and agreed, as it is
exchanged by Service Oriented systems, defined and used in service
interfaces, is crucial to things like the share-ability of services
across the enterprise and indeed between enterprises. However,
historically, the IT community hasn't really succeeded in managing
semantics, especially across system and organisational boundaries.
Introducing a semantic-management layer to the SOA will help to address
many of these problems. |
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This article is
an interview
with Nicholas Carr, the author of the well known Harvard Business
Review article, “IT Doesn’t Matter”. Here he outlines
how his views have evolved and now recognises that there are exceptions
where IT can indeed provide competitive advantage. |
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Monday 23rd October
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Creating
a
scalable SOA that supports expanding service demands requires an
analysis of scalability requirements and issues at design time. As
businesses become more accustomed to consuming information in this way
the old approach of throwing more processing power at the problem is
unlikely to cut it, at least not without costing an arm and a leg
anyway. This article discusses Grid Computing as an alternative
approach to meeting the demands of an expanding SOA. |
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This
article
discusses the use of frameworks for supporting IT governance and how
selecting a framework is only part of the solution. Identifying the
important elements that are of practical use to your business is
equally important in gaining benefit. |
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As enterprises
continue to
develop closer integration with external trading partners and provide
increased connectivity for mobile and remote access for employees who
are on-the-road, a lot of effort has been and still is being put into
securing the enterprise network from hostile places like the internet.
However, it is the remote devices that employees take out of the office
that are most vulnerable and most difficult to protect. Bandwidth and
wide-area wireless connectivity is still not mature enough to operate a
model where no data is stored on mobile devices. Do you know where your
private data is - a crucial step in any security audit - and what can
you do to protect it? |
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|
This article
provides a
number of real-world SOA success stories, refuting a number of
published articles downplaying the practical benefits of SOA adoption. |
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Monday 16th October
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The
following
article discusses the need for SOA evangelists (e.g. vendors, analysts,
IT professionals) to move away from promoting SOA as a technology
concept and communicate the impact of SOA in terms of the business
needs that it can address. |
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Real-time
and
event-driven analytical technology is about to radically reshape our
ability to predict future events. Many attempts have been made in the
past to produce systems that can predict things like stock markets but
increasily complex models that define the cause-and-effect
relationships of events are already producing accurate results in
well-defined, small-scope domains. It's only a matter of time before
these models operate over wider scopes. |
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Views and
opinions from the
Computing IT leaders panel on educating the business in IT and return
on investment. A well designed architecture is a key component in
supporting some of the ideas here. |
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This article
proposes that
different generations think about IT in different ways and that
CIO’s need to make sure they are in tune with the thoughts and
needs of the younger generation. |
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A recent survey
in the US
indicates that government is experiencing far fewer SOA success stories
compared to those enjoyed by private sector businesses. This article
outlines these findings and puts forward some possible reasons for
failure within the public sector. |
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Monday 9th October
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Are
the
traditional ways of deploying software starting to be phased out in
preference to the new, hosted software deployments provided by
companies like Salesforce.com and Google? Both of these vendors provide
solutions that enable users to collaborate effectively over the
internet without the need to deploy and manage software on every user's
PC. Hosted software solutions are not that new, services to remotely
host software such as Microsoft's Office products have existed for
several years but don't seem to have gained much traction. The
difference with the newer services, such as Google and
Salesforce.com's, is that the software has been designed from the
ground up to be hosted. Are we reaching the point where this approach
will start to overtake the locally-deployed approach? |
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This
article
outlines a vision, predicting how the management and ubiquitous sharing
of information will be the key factor in shaping the role of IT in the
future. |
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In most
organisations today,
applications are integrated using a combination of heavy weight EAI
platforms and toolsets, plus a number of custom written integration
solutions. Custom solutions are not written because of gaps in the EAI
platform capabilty, far from it. The reason often comes down to
projects not having the skills, time or budget to adopt the corporate
EAI approach; instead prefering to stick to what they know best.
Integration Appliance vendors are seeking to fill this gap by providing
a simple plugin integration solution that meets upwards of 80% of
common integration requirements without the steap learning curve of EAI. |
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This article
discusses how
BPM can be used to identify areas where a company can leverage SOA to
deliver results effectively and efficiently. |
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Interesting
interview from DM Review covering some business intelligence and
integration issues that organisation face. |
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Monday 2nd October
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This
article
suggests that if an IT department is innivotive then it cannot be
expected to have a 100% success rate and should not be afraid of
failure or of terminating a project. As long as it’s success rate
is better then business projects it is doing OK. |
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The
use of
biometric security is reaching the point where widespread adoption is
imminent. After many years of failed trials and a lack of trust about
its reliability, what's changed? Improved ease-of-use of biometric
solutions - especially compared to password or PIN-based approaches -
has played a large part along with many successful examples of
biometric security solutions that are now in use across the world. |
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This article
describes the
importance of viewing Services in SOA from a business perspective
rather than an IT perspective where the focus is on what they represent
as opposed to the technology used to implement them. |
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Customer facing
business
integration is demonstrating a serious return on investment for many
organisations. Unfortunately this isn’t simply a case of moving
supply chain integration solutions across to the demand chain;
customers are naturally demanding a more flexibile and more friendly
service. In this article, Line56 discusses how many organisations are
looking towards an IaaS model to help overcome many of these customer
integration hurdles. |
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Excerpt from
'Enterprise
Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution'
that has ten leadership principles for EA with examples from companies
such as BT and ING Direct. |
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Monday 25th September
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This
article
presents the findings of SIM’s survey of CIO’s into their
top management concerns and technology priorities for 2006. |
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There
is a lot
of talk about real time architecture, currently, where an enterprise
can react to change rapidly and painlessly. Many attempts to change the
way in which IT systems are delivered to support this have been made
over the years but organisations are still struggling to change the IT
systems - that are vital to the operation of the enterprise - in this
rapid and painless way. SOA represents a shift in the way the whole
architecture is viewed and it is only by approaching SOA at an
architectural level across the enterprise - not just implementing Web
Services technology - that organisations can become Real Time
Enterprises. This is no small task and covers a large scope of change
which means that everyone has some way to go before the goals can be
realised. |
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This article
from IBM discusses the need for governance in successful SOA adoption |
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Successful data
warehousing
solutions are built on solid foundations with a firm understanding of
the logical data model. All too often however, organisations think that
if they throw enough technology at the problem, they can bypass this
complicated aspect of warehousing and a satisfactory solution will
still pop out of the other end, right? Wrong. DMReview discusses the
importance of the Logical Data Model in realising the full potential of
data warehousing projects. |
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Monday 18th September
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Although
it is
packed with a host of new features and capabilities, the additional
resource requirements for Vista are not inconsiderable. With release
candidate 1 (RC1) released in the last couple of weeks, to more than
two million testers, how will enterprises justify the costs of
upgrading? |
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A
report from the Intelligent Enterprise website on Business Intelligence
trends. |
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In this
article, the author
describes a collection of SOA bad practices (or anti-patterns) that
should be avoided if you don’t want your SOA initiative to create
more problems than it solves. |
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This article
discusses the
size of a successful SOA adoption and suggests that most companies are
many years away from the SOA aim of agile computing. |
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Monday 11th September
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This
blog gives some interesting examples of different types of Enterprise
Architecture metric based on a number of sources. |
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This
article discusses the view that there is more than one course of action
to deal with IT problems that arise. |
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Business
Process Management
(BPM) is gaining significant momentum in the insurance industry. The
ability to design, monitor and manage processes effectively is helping
organisations to reduce cycle times and win more business. This article
takes an in depth look at how BPM is affecting the insurance industry
and puts forward some key questions for the business and for product
vendors. |
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Continuous
partial attention
is a cry for help; don't overburden cognitively fatigued knowledge
workers. With ever increasing capabilities for remote and mobile
telecommuications, is there anything that can be done to reap the
benefits of these technologies while reducing the distraction that they
obviously create? This article suggests that portals may provide the
answer but while a strategy that constrains - in a good way - the
technologies that knowledge workers in the enterprise have available to
them, it may not be so easy to tempt people away from the latest
must-have technologies and gadgets. In the early days of PDAs, it was a
personal decision to use one and the devices were not supported by the
organisation, which provided email and calendaring etc. through things
like Notes. However, as more and more people started using PDAs and
were synchronising them with the corporate groupware, in order to
ensure things like security policy was being applied, the organisation
had to embrace, provide and support PDAs. The demand is still there,
and it will be a very difficult balancing act constraining what
knowledge workers can do in order to reduce distraction against
constraining what they need to do. |
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This article
describes how
by providing senior business execs with greater ‘cross-business
unit’ visibility of investments and IT operational information,
IT decision makers can more easily justify enterprise level initiatives
for innovation, efficiency improvements and cost reduction. |
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Monday 4th September
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The
importance
of Master Data Management (MDM) is frequently overlooked. Without MDM,
critical business information will often be viewed very differently
from one department to the next, with potentially damaging results. The
author goes on to suggest that MDM can ease the pain when it comes to
Sarbanes Oxley compliance, and that SOA pretty much can’t happen
without it. |
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Apple's
fortunes
have literally changed dramatically since they introduced the iPod less
than five years ago. Looking back at how Apple has changed and
innovated over the last few years, what lessons can enterprise
architects learn so that they are able to support innovation in their
organisation? |
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This article
examines the
data management issues that can typically arise as a result of adopting
a Service Oriented Architecture. Of particular concern is the
management of document based XML data that is constantly changing
throughout the lifecycle of a business process. |
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Monday 28th August
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Organisations
will be able to reap the maximum benefits from SOA only when they can
validate that everything is actually working 'behind the scenes'. The
loosely-coupled approach of SOA presents a vast range of permutations
for testing. However, the well-defined interfaces of the services means
that they can be extensively tested against their contracts before
being released to consumers. Likelywise, consumers can test the
operation of their components using services that are known to behave
'as advertised'. Despite these benefits of the loose-coupling, the
end-to-end solution must still be tested. |
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Despite
all of
the bad press, the author of this article argues that some US companies
and investors are reaping the benefits of SOX compliance due to
increased levels of IT Governance. |
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|
This article
examines some
of the difficulties experienced by service implementers in translating
complex, and often unpredictable, business processes into consistent
service logic, and goes on to proposes a possible solution. |
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Monday 21st August
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|
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Interesting
article from 2005 where a CIO describes his 'big rules' for IT services
around which he can govern the IT organisation. |
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|
This
article looks at how the open nature of SOA has the potential to cause
problems with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. |
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An in depth
look at Business
Process Management as a practical solution to cracking efficiency
barriers. In this article the author argues that, whilst technology
will be an important part of any BPM solution, the place to start is
process definition. |
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This article is
an interview
with Raj Bector, senior manager of Mercer Oliver Wyman's strategic IT
practice who discusses the need to view enterprise data as a
“product” to manage and delivered using a supply-chain
model similar to that used in the manufacturing business world. |
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Monday 14th August
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Adobe’s
senior director of product marketing talks about the demise of the
‘classic’ internet browser in favour of richer clients that
provide native support for web services. |
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In
this article
the author argues that best practice is not always the best way forward
– particularly where organisational design issues are at stake
– and goes on to suggest that adherence to best practice in
certain circumstances is likely to stifle innovation. |
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|
Discusses how
data
architecture initiatives tend to implement a strategic capability then
fall over when it comes to execution. It provides some ideas on how to
execute architecture once it is implemented. |
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Survey of
government trends in EA. |
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Monday 7th August
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|
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|
According
to the
author of this article, there is evidence that SOA is one of a number
of factors causing organisations to rethink their buy versus build
strategy. The incremental approach associated with SOA projects is one
of the reasons why organisations are taking another look at building
their own systems. |
|
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|
Some
interesting examples of how CIOs have saved money and still managed to
innovate at the same time |
|
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|
This article
discusses the
fact that the IT budgets are generally the first to be cut and the last
to catch up when profits increase, and explores the reasons behind this. |
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|
This article
describes how
organisations should look to define metrics against IT management
processes rather than IT assets in order to gain a more accurate and
useful measure of IT Service performance. |
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As SOA adoption
grows, the
development of bespoke software by internal teams will grow in
importance. As businesses face the need to respond to rapidly changing
market conditions, the dynamism of a fully-implemented SOA will enable
them to change their processes and applications with increased agility.
To futher enable this agility - ultimately to the logical conclusion of
a dynamic and continously changing enterprise - the software that
supports and automates the business processes will have to become
bespoke to that organisation. However, this bespoke software will be
constructed through a combination of components that the organisation
buys (the unique capabilities) and components that it builds (the
commodity or non-differentiating capabiliites). To meet the needs of a
continously changing operation, internal development teams will be
required to develop the bespoke software, using SOA. |
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Monday 31st July
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|
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|
According
to a
newly released IDC study, service-oriented architecture (SOA) will
continue to have a profound impact on the overall services market, as
implementation of this architecture often requires spending on a range
of external services. These services include consulting and systems
integration, and eventually outsourcing, application management,
support, and training. IDC forecasts that worldwide spending on
SOA-based external services will reach $8.6 billion in 2006,
experiencing a 138% increase from $3.6 billion in 2005. IDC projects
that by 2010 global SOA-based services spending will reach $33.8
billion. |
|
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|
The
big ERP
vendors are overhauling their software architecture to create a
platform for running service oriented business process. There is no
doubt that this is a step in the right direction; for one thing it
spells the end to the rigid monolithic resource planning solutions of
today. But Industry Analysts point out that the cost of the technology
‘upgrade’ will be hard to justify from a business
perspective. |
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|
This article
suggests that
there are four phases to go through before an organisation can be said
to have SOA in place, and gives the opinion that most organisations are
currently at phase one or two. |
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|
|
|
Interesting
article suggesting steps for prioritising IT projects based on business
value |
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back to top
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Monday 24th July
|
|
|
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|
This
article
recognises that many IT professionals feel in the dark about the IT
strategy and suggests ways to work out what the strategy is, if it is
less than specific. |
|
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|
This
paper looks at some of the challenges and problems of Enterprise
Architecture efforts |
|
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|
An overview of
the Business
Process Execution Language (BPEL); commonly used to describe
orchestration of services. This article explains the core concepts of
BPEL and leads into a worked technical example of what a BPEL flow
might look like for a business travel process. |
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|
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|
Recently,
Amazon has
introduced a new "simple" infrastructure service - SQS (Simple Queue
Service) - to add to S3 (Simple Storage Service). These are both
metered Web-based infrastructure services providing queues and storage
capabilities. Amazon is taking a pragmatic approach to the technology
that is being used to deliver these services. Rather than expose these
using the WS-* or Java standards, Amazon provides their own toolkits
based on standards like SOAP and XML and HTTP, reducing the technology
platform requirements for the consumers of these services. If use of
these services takes off, support for the WS-* standards will be
required but that should be easy for Amazon to accomodate. Right now,
as John Udell (Infoworld) says, "when you plant a new field of grass
there’s an old adage: Watch where the footpaths go before you lay
down the sidewalks" |
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Monday 17th July
|
|
|
|
|
This
technical
article takes a broad look at some of the tools and approaches that
organisations are using to get a hold on an expanding portfolio of web
services. |
|
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|
The
Automobile
Association plan to use a dedicated directory service to manage user
identity across of all its systems. They recognise, however, that
selecting the technology and the products is only part of a successful
implementation. Developing and operating the framework and access rules
will be one of the main challenges but will provide signficant benefits
in terms of reduced costs, greater responsiveness and regulatory
compliance. |
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|
This article is
an interview
with Ranjit Tinaikar, IT strategy practice leader at McKinsey &
Co., where he discusses the need for organisations to change their
mindset from a tactical-focus to a more holistic and strategic view in
order to gain real business value from their IT investments. |
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|
Analysts say
that SOA is the
next software architecture shift in a long-term major trend that
technology goes through about every seven years. It warns the industry
to be ready and discusses who the major players are likely to be. |
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|
This article
discusses how
taking a strategic view to cost-cutting, with alignment to the business
strategy, enables the CIO to demonstrate clear value. |
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back to top
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Monday 10th July
|
|
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|
How
might
America's dependence on oil impact convential economies and ultimately
the digital economy? This article claims that a more local-centric
economy is the enevitable conclusion, with unacceptably high transport
costs making eCommerce - consumer shopping in particular -
unsustainable. What this article does miss, however, is how the digital
technology can reduce and even entirely remove transport costs by
enabling things such as remote working. |
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|
This
article
suggest that on average only 20% of the IT budget is spent on new
projects with the remainder going to “keep everything else
running”. The problem is exacerbated by the inability of the CIO
to understand or have any visibility over these costs. |
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|
This article
provides a
summary of a discussion that took place between a number of federal and
industry executives in the US regarding the role that SOA plays in
their respective organisations and some of the challenges that they
face. |
| |
|
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|
An interesting
article that
takes a look at the realities of Service Oriented Architecture and the
challenges in making a case for it outside of IT. The author suggests
that whilst SOA may not be the right approach for all, any organisation
seeking high process agility and independence from the whim’s of
software vendors will make good candidates for adoption. |
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Monday 3rd July
|
|
|
|
|
In
this zdnet
blog, it is suggested that BPM and SOA share the same goal (managing
business change) but come at it from different angles: BPM from the
business side, and SOA - rightly or wrongly - being driven by
Technology. The author suggests however that regardless of who actually
‘wins’ the battle, any technology-backed business change is
far more likely to make a difference than the more human-oriented
approaches (e.g. Six Sigma) of the past. |
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Nothing
haunts
the Enterprise Architecture discipline more than the elusive quest to
define the business value of EA. Sought by first-time
practitioners—and by established EA professionals responding to
executive demand for quantifiable value—every enterprise
architect must eventually face this daunting challenge. |
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|
Survey from
Information Age
that suggests that bespoke development and integration give the best
ROI, but the cost and complexity are a barrier to change. |
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|
This article
discusses the
survey findings that US companies will significantly increase their
spending on SOA based services through 2006. |
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back to top
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Monday 26th June
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This
article
discusses the need for IT organisations to better understand the impact
that IT change management has on managing overall business risk. |
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While
the World
Wide Web taught us to link pages and documents electronically, the
Semantic Web lets us link smaller elements of data and information and
assign meaning to the links between data elements. Importantly, the
meaning of these elements is well understood and agreed upon by all
parties involved in the exchange. This embedded meaning makes it easier
to define information more precisely and convey how it should be used
by applications at both ends of the exchange. |
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|
This article
discusses four tips for ensuring that the IT is aligned to the business
needs |
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|
Brief article
where a CIO
explains how she used common project management techniques to align her
IT department with the business goals. |
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At the
Application
Integration and Web Services Summit held this month, Gartner identified
5 application integration trends that they believe are exerting heavy
influence on the design and integration of modern business applications. |
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back to top
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Monday 19th June
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This
article
describes an approach for successfully managing large scale enterprise
change initiatives, in particular, the nature of the support
organisation and skills that need to be in place. |
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|
Information
Age article which discusses why organisations need more robust
approaches to information management |
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New information
standards
underpinned by faster, more flexible infrastructure is set to
revolutionise trade in goods and services. Such services include
software - referred to as Sofware as a Service (SaaS) - a revised and
improved approach to the application service provider (ASP) model. |
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Monday 12th June
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Enterprise
Architecture often still has to justify its existence and demonstrate
the benefits that it can bring to the organisation. This article
demonstrates how an effective EA Practice contributes to the goals of
the CIO. |
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|
Discusses
how
‘best practice’ is really about adapting industry best
approach to the needs of your organisation, rather than implementing
some documented specification. |
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Rationalisation
in IT often
focuses on hardware consolidation, simply because hardware tends to be
a more visible asset and therefore relatively quick to identify and
remove. Rationalising application portfolios however is an entirely
different story. This article highlights some common characteristics of
IT Asset Management that can help organisation’s gain a better
understanding of what applications they have, and therefore how best to
manage them. |
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An
overview of
the benefits and challenges of Business Process Management (BPM), the
many approaches being taken by software vendors and the relationship
that BPM has with SOA. |
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back to top
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Monday 5th June
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Describes
how
SOA is about articulating business process independent of technology,
then worrying about the technology and some of the challenges. |
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The
SemanticWeb
is breaking out of research labs and into the back office, as
businesses of all types prove the potential of this far-reaching
technology. |
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In many
organisations today,
business processes are effectively controlled - or rather constrained -
by IT because of the skills that are required to affect business
process change in the underlying applications and technology. Line56
discuss the importance of Business Process Management (BPM) in
empowering the business to make quick and effective changes to
processes, without the need for being ‘IT savvy’. |
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|
The
following
article describes the results of a meeting of the U.S. CIO Executive
Council where they explored how to better explain to the business, the
value that IT brings to the enterprise. |
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back to top
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Monday 29th May
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Despite
the
plethora of technologies aimed at promoting re-use, most organisations'
application portfolios are still expanding. Computer Weekly suggests
that striping out the associated complexity and cost will involve more
than just application rationalisation; understanding and rationalising
the business processes and data supported by those applications is
often overlooked. |
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Discusses
SLAs and how they can actually be counterproductive to successful
outsourcing programmes. |
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Some cutting
edge
technologies are discussed in this article. In particular, a security
software firm has developed a poacher-turned-gamekeeper 'controlled
worm' that repairs holes in your security infrastructure as it finds
them - rather than exploiting them. |
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A
brief article
suggesting that most organisations have a long way to go before
reaching any kind of maturity in the SOA space. Service enabling
applications alone does not mean service orientation. |
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back to top
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Monday 22nd May
|
|
|
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|
A
(PDF) document
from 2001 which describes a FEAF-based approach to architecture.
Although large, it has some useful reminders on the key elements of
architecture and why they are important. |
|
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|
A
Gartner survey
of 1,400 CIOs shows that transformation of the IT organisation is
accelerating. CIOs must respond to expectations that IT makes the
company more competitive. |
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|
In the first
article in
this (PDF) document (from Information Age's Effective IT summit 2006),
controversial IT industry theorist Nicholas Carr challenges business
leaders to make technology more effective - by getting it out of the
enterprise. However, as the reaction panel points out, it is not as
straight forward to commoditise IT as Carr suggests. While much of the
infrastructure, in terms of hardware and low-level software, is
commoditised - and the stack that makes up infrastructure moves up and
up (e.g. Application Servers are now infrastructure, whereas little
more than five years ago this was complex application software), the IT
that makes the difference to the business is rarely commodity. IT is
about supporting the way in which business uses information. What
information they have and how they use it are at the are the heart of a
businesses ability to innovate and competitive edge. Perhaps it depends
on your definition of IT and certainly the discussion is complicated by
the recursive or layered nature of information technology. As soon as
one end of the stack becomes commodity, a new innovative and bespoke
form of IT appears at the other end, taking advantage of all the
commoditised technology, to support a new piece of competitive edge for
a business. |
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Many
people, it
seems, are sceptical about the value of Wikis. However, by providing a
tool for people to document their understanding, best practices and
knowledge in a way that can then be reviewed, edited and even deleted
by others in the enterprise, the true knowledge in the enterprise about
the enterprise can be captured and used. |
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Monday 15th May
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This
article highlights the significance of organisational culture and
workforce acceptance in the successful delivery of Business Process
Management across an enterprise. |
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Following
frameworks blindly, such as ITIL, can be a bad thing. Instead, the
extent of their usage should be based on the needs of your business. We
often see similar problems where architecture frameworks are perceived
to be a solution rather than a tool. |
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This
article
discusses a survey on IT spending predictions over the next year and
discusses the difference between US and European views, with the US
taking a more strategic approach to IT. |
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|
|
| |
There
are so many different definitions and views as to what Enterprise
Architecture actually is these days that the term is losing significant
meaning and in some cases can have negative connotations. This article
discusses an approach that focuses on providing and demonstrating value
to the business. |
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back to top
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Monday 8th May
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This article discusses how SOA is gradually
starting to reach a critical mass and maturity that will enable the
original promises made about SOA to become reality. |
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This article describes how taking a
business-oriented approach to running an IT organisation can help
organisations to cope with the pressure to minimise IT spend while at
the same time ensuring that investment is focused on providing
competitive advantage for the business. |
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The
service-fulfillment model for IT is dying. A new philosophy of
innovation and productivity is being born. Here’s what CIOs need to do
to usher in a new age of IT. |
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With many people talking about the next
generation of the Internet - "Web 2.0" - in this interview Sir Tim
Berners-Lee talks about where he sees the Internet going. |
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Monday 1st May
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For some organisations, outsourcing is becoming
almost compulsive; a knee-jerk reaction to solving cost problems. The
author takes a look at some important observations made by Gartner’s
chief of research Linda Cohen. Cohen suggests that companies need to
think more strategically when it comes to outsourcing; starting with a
review of existing agreements and resolving the buyer seller disconnect
that has crept in over time. |
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This article provides a case study of how an
organisation took a top-down, cyclical approach to maintaining
enterprise alignment to business goals and strategy. |
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Interesting
round table discussion from fcw.com on how the development of SOA can
be difficult but the economic case justifies the effort. |
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|
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In support of the uptake of Web Services for
Business-to-Business (B2B) integration, the Web Services
Interoperability Organisation (WS-I) took steps to providing how-to
documents for asynchronous Web Services. The new charters are based on
the RAMP technology from IBM, Daimler, Ford, GM and others,
incorporating WS-Addressing, WS-ReliableMessaging, and WS-Secure
Conversation specifications to both the WS-I Basic Profile and a new
profile called Reliable Secure Profile. Well defined and standardised
support for ansynchronous messaging will be a major enabling for
implementations of SOA that span organisation boundaries. |
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back to top
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Monday 24th April
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This
article
discusses the emergence of Master Data Management as an approach to
maintaining clean, consistent data across an enterprise. |
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|
This
article
discusses various different incarnations of Enterprise Architecture at
Dow Jones, and the methods which have been most successful. |
|
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|
A brief,
high-level, but useful explanation of TOGAF and its role and purpose. |
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Business
processes can generally be placed into one of three categories: 1)
Common to all businesses (e.g. payroll); 2) common within an industry
vertical (e.g. FSA regulations); 3) Core competance. Focusing on Core
Competance, this article takes a brief but interesting look at the
activities that an organisation should undertake in order to
successfully change, implement and utilise Business Process change. |
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|
An
early adopter
of XML for Business-to-Business (B2B) integration, and emerging from
the hi-tech sector, we are now seeing RosettaNet being used in much
wider range of applications including logistics, FMCG and media. |
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back to top
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Monday 17th April
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Although
many IT executives still struggle to gain user and management buy-in
for Metadata management, it is becoming increasingly important for many
of today's IT intiatives. |
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|
This
article discusses five approaches that can help build a link between
the structured data world (e.g. database records) and unstructured data
(e.g. text in emails). |
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Many
organisations have invested large amounts of time and money
implementing EDI solutions and once these are running successfully,
they work very well - enabling the automation of many
Business-to-Business (B2B) processes. Therefore, many are reluctant to
re-visit or change these EDI integrations.
New technologies and standards that are being used for B2B, such as
ebXML and Web Services, will have to demonstrate that they can
outperform "traditional" EDI if they are to tempt organisations away
from their exisitng EDI solutions. More likely, these technologies will
have to co-exist as part of an overall B2B Integration Architecture for
the foreseeable future to enable companies to quickly and easily
integrate with their business and trading partners. EDI is still very
much alive.
|
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This
article discusses how Business Process and IT Outsourcing models will
need to change in the future and the role of governance in ensuring
that strategic business goals are achieved. |
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|
This
article describes the alphabet soup of IT acronyms out there and
suggests that most of them have one major commonality: data integration. |
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back to top
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Monday 10th April
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At
the Enterprise Architect Summit 2005, Dave Chappell of Sonic Software
had a heated, public debate with a couple of evangelists from Microsoft
concerning an ESB and Biztalk. However, Dave's discussion of Service
Mediation in this article is of particular interest. Mediation is one
of the key capabilities of SOA Infrastructure, but ESB architectures
can only mediate service requests made via the bus technology of the
ESB - requiring the deployment of the ESB container at each service
endpoint. If SOA is to truly deliver on all of its promises, ESB
vendors like Sonic must break this dependency on the ESB container in
order to reach the Service Mediation capabilities of the SOA
Infrastructure. |
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|
| |
This
article provides an interesting perspective on the growing use of the
term ‘enterprise’ when referring to technology products. |
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|
|
| |
This
article
discusses how outsourcing can be good for an organisation, however,
firms need to be aware that there can be pitfalls and should consider a
multisourcing strategy. |
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|
|
| |
In
this article, DMReview discuss the potential short falls of Business
Processing Management (BPM) and suggest that complex, non-linear
processes (e.g. spotting identity theft) can be better managed through
Complex Event Processing (CEP). |
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back to top
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Monday 3rd April
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|
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|
This
is a site
that holds MIT’s enterprise architecture documentation. The
approach does not exactly align to the way EAS would address the
problem, however, it is useful as an example as to how other
organisations have approached development of their architecture. |
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Rather
than a
purely technology shift, SOA could well turn out to be a focus for the
introduction of better structure, reductions in unconstrained
development to reduce costs, improve IT responsiveness and increase the
repeatability of the processes. Bringing together the techniques,
patterns, processes, components, services, skills and experience
requires a strong enterprise architecture approach - it is Service
Oriented Architecture after all! |
|
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|
This article
discusses the
European Union’s plans to launch a European Institute of
Technology to rival the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to boost
the Regions R&D and try to bring it in line with US spending. |
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SOA
was born out
of a need to provide organisations with a technology framework for
designing and integrating reusable software components, according to
the author of this article. A brief history of the technical
predecessors of Web Services technology are provided with some examples
of how organisations are implementing solutions that support an SOA
approach. |
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back to top
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Monday 27th March
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|
Creating an organisation that is resilient to any eventuality and
planning for the unexpected need not be a potentially wasteful hedge
against disaster. The heightened awareness of the realities of the
world enables a resilient company to compete better than purely
efficient organisations.
Rather than focussing on the disaster recovery viewpoint, this review
of Yossi Sheffi's book, brings out the benefits of defining an
enterprise's processes for resilience rather than just for efficiency. |
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A discussion on how legacy IT is one of the biggest obstacles to
effective business transformation today. |
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|
This article
discusses the role that an enterprise’s IT organisation can play in
bridging the gap between business and IT. |
|
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|
Most UK businesses waste investments in IT governance systems, research
claims. |
|
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|
A lighthearted look at business models of several prominent companies,
and what you can learn and perhaps apply to your company strategy. |
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back to top
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Monday 20th March
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|
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| |
Maintaining multilingual systems can be costly.
This is not only an issue for the public-facing websites of global
organisations but also for their internal IT systems. With drives
towards globally-standard processes and systems, how do organisations
strike the right balance between a single language for global systems
and localised multilingual systems? |
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|
|
| |
Interesting blog article which follows a
similar line of argument that Jason Powell of EAS used in his recent
article in Evaluation Centre, that SOA can be a starting point for EA.
There are some interesting comments at the end of the article. |
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This article discusses the importance of the CIO and the CEO working
together to ensure that the IT solutions are fully focused on
delivering the business objectives of the organisation. |
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| |
This article describes a top down approach to
managing meta data, in which concepts are identified and refined, and
the relations between them are described. |
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back to top
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Monday 13th March
|
| |
|
|
| |
CIOs of midsized companies often argue that an
EA is something only big enterprises can create or afford. A CIO of a
midsized firm discusses how wrong that perception is. |
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According to IDC, companies that can quickly
adapt their products, services, and business models for the industry's
changing dynamics will be the successful ones in 2006. Two of the
driving factors behind this prediction are the growth in innovative
solutions through the open source community and the movement towards an
online ‘IT as a service’ model. This article summarises these and other
highlights of the IDC report. |
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|
| |
This article provides advice for enterprises looking to develop their
IT organization as an internal service provider; more specifically,
identifying common pitfalls for developing and maintaining
relationships between IT and the business. |
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| |
It is still early days for Ajax - asynchronous
JavaScript with XML - and it is important to start slowly with this
technology. However, organisations are already getting benefits from
more interactive user interfaces for applications that are delivered
through the web browser. This is a "hot", new technology but it is
ready to be exploited by the enterprise. |
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| |
This article discusses how Wiki’s are proving
to be effective online collaboration tools that major corporations are
beginning to adopt. It suggests that while measuring the ROI of wiki’s
is hard, considering the business advantages often makes the case more
obvious. |
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back to top
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Monday 6th March
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| |
|
|
| |
This article takes a look at how IT should be
marketed and suggests that a mass-marketing approach doesn’t
work. Some views on what approaches should be taken are also
discussed. |
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|
|
| |
In this article, ZapThink discusses 7 things
that you should avoid saying during your enterprise architecture team
meetings; the recurring pitfalls that companies adopting SOA often face. |
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|
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| |
The role of meta data in the enterprise is changing to become the
foundation for the agile systems and processes. SOA adoption is a key
enabler for the realisation of metadata-driven solutions which will
allow enterprises to manage effectively and quickly change the
behaviour of processes and systems. |
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| |
This article discusses how SOA can be used to
solve the tactical as well as the strategic needs of the business,
stressing the importance of Governance and business and IT
interoperability. |
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|
|
| |
A look at an all too common problem with some
interesting anecdotes and analogies that will most likely strike a
chord with anyone who has any sort of relationship with IT. |
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back to top
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Monday 27th February
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| |
This is quite an old article but it describes the different methods for
measuring IT value, provides some opinions on the effectiveness of the
methods and also some indication of the cost of implementation. As a
broad overview of the different techniques available, it is very good.
|
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| |
This is DMReview's view on the information
technology trends that CIO’s should be considering for 2006.
|
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|
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| |
While practical business applications of Grid
technology are still in their infancy, SOA is the focus of attention
today. So, what's the link between these two? Although technology
vendors want to generate as much interest as they can in Grid
technology, when it is delivered the business will see very little of
the Grid technology itself - which will be an integral part of the
operating system platforms. The business view of Grid will actually be
an SOA, as they call on services on an as-required basis - technical
services, functional services, processing services and so on.
|
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|
| |
This article describes the results of a survey
that looks at a number of key enterprise-level IT issues that are
concerning organisations today.
|
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| |
Reducing the amount of IT budgets that are tied up
in non-discretionary spending has become a barrier that must be
overcome by companies looking to use IT for transformative growth and
competitive differentiation -- not just to comply with the next round
of regulatory onslaught.
|
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back to top
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Monday 20th February
|
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|
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| |
IBM are planning to create an SOA maturity model
standard. However, some in the media, question whether IBM really
understands what is required for SOA maturity. Unlike many other SOA
initiatives from technology vendors, this would be a standardisation of
a process, rather than technology standards. Will the SOA community
take up a process defined by a technology vendor or would this stand a
better chance of success if sponsored by a third party?
|
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This article discusses the importance of
Governance for an organisation adopting an SOA approach.
|
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|
|
| |
In this article the author puts forward their top
five reasons for why organisations should embrace Business Process
Management.
|
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|
|
| |
Discusses the need for good governance to support
delivery of effective SOA. Although it doesn’t cover all elements of a
good governance framework, it includes some good examples of what is
required in an effective framework for SOA.
|
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| |
This article describes how the knowledge gained
through appropriate documentation of an organisation’s enterprise
architecture can support management of operational risk.
|
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back to top
|
| |
Monday 13th February
|
| |
|
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| |
This is the first article in a survey about how
the way people work within organisations has changed dramatically and
how organisations are having to adapt. From an architecture perspective
there are logical impacts on how areas such as governance can work
effectively. The full survey requires subscription or can be bought
from the website as a pdf.
|
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|
|
| |
Most of the hard work that organisations are
putting into implementing SOA is focussed on providing business
services and the infrastructure to consume them. However, they may be
missing out on the potential of SOA if they ignore the possibilities
for applying SOA to user interfaces.
|
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| |
This article discusses where the ROI from an SOA
implementation will typically come from.
|
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| |
A generation ago, quant's turned finance upside
down. Now they're mapping out ad campaigns and building new businesses
from mountains of personal data. But how do you convert written words
into math? Neal Goldman - a Wall Street math entrepreneur - says it
takes a combination of algebra and geometry and results in a polytope
with near-infinite dimensions!
|
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| |
This article draws comparisons between governing a
town or city and governing an SOA-based IT Architecture. It also
explores the potential lessons that IT can learn from the approaches
taken by city governments.
|
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back to top
|
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Monday 6th February
|
| |
|
|
| |
This article discusses the problems traditionally
faced by companies trying to implement the changes identified by their
BI initiatives and how to overcome these by integrating the effort with
their Business Architecture and Governance programmes.
|
| |
|
|
| |
A wiki is an online tool that allows users to
update and publish content collaboratively. In this article the author
suggests that some organisations are already starting to adopt wiki's
as part of an approach to enterprise knowledge creation and management
|
| |
|
|
| |
A review of the issues that Computing magazine
think will be hot this year. A number of the issues are ideal for a
good architecture driven initiative to help resolve them.
|
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| |
Governance is a fundamental requirement if SOA is
to be effective and deliver the benefits that are promised, as with any
architectural initiative. However, to make the governance work, you
need to understand the culture of your organisation and ensure that the
processes fit the way your organisation works. One size does not fit
all.
|
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| |
The SOA bandwagon is gathering momentum and new
products are promising to deliver the business agility, re-use and cost
control that together comprise the holy grail of SOA based integration;
survey results however are suggesting that in reality SOA is not
delivering. In this article, the author identifies six common 'SOA
delusions' which are hampering the progress and success of SOA based
integration.
|
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back to top
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Monday 30th January
|
| |
|
|
| |
When it comes to data cleansing initiatives, are
companies throwing out the baby with the bath water? In this article,
the author argues that retaining 'dirty data' might actually help
businesses interpret good data better; although of cause this comes at
a price.
|
| |
|
|
| |
In SOA and indeed any application integration
scenarios, we are looking to achieve semantic interoperability between
very different systems. Defining and using formal ontologies will help
to achieve this semantic interoperability. However, we may have several
of these ontologies in the enterprise, e.g. for packaged applications
such as SAP or shared ontologies in which common semantics are shared
between several systems. Mappings can be defined to translate between
the various ontologies, which can then be applied by a mediator system
to provide the semantic interoperability that enables many of the
ideals of SOA. We are going to need this mapping step sooner or later
and it's much easier to build this step in sooner rather than later.
|
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This article discusses the need for clarity in an
organisation when moving into the SOA world, as a small change can
impact multiple areas of the business. The role of the enterprise
architecture is very important in gaining the necessary clarity.
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This article discusses the inclusion of Complex
Event Processing (CEP) in the new generation of SOA software and what
this may bring for the future.
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Why can't IT and the business side get along? A
lack of communication and trust are among the main reasons, according
to the author of this article.
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Monday 23rd January
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When is Enterprise Architecture most effective and
what are the main reasons that EA initiatives fail? Many people still
do not recognise that Enterprise Architecture is not just about IT
hardware and software but must also cover business processes and the
organisation structure. The architecture enables the enterprise to
ensure that the business, applications, information and technology
views are operating in concert.
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A report on how IT projects are often failing due
to poor requirements management. It discusses how some organisations
are approaching the problem in different ways, moving away from the
traditional requirements gathering approaches.
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The Government has approved plans for the
development of an Institute for IT Security Professionals (IISP) to be
set up to give IT security experts professional status on a par with
occupations such as accountancy and law.
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This article provides an extensive overview of how
taking a value and architecture-driven strategy approach to business
solution delivery helps to manage the expectations of solution
stakeholders and meet them effectively.
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In order to align business strategy planning with
the technology organisation, the strategic planning process should
include business strategy, investment analysis and benefits
realisation. This articles argues that, with tools like these,
organisations will be better prepared to navigate the winds of change
and uncertainty and to chart a course toward business success.
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Monday 16th January
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This article describes real-world examples of
organisations gaining business process flexibility and tangible
business benefits from adopting standards based, loosely coupled IT
architectures.
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This blog discusses the changing role of UDDI from
its origins as a runtime discovery engine to becoming a policy
enforcement mechanism.
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This article discusses whether companies with an
enthusiasm for process management programs are actually stifling their
ability to innovate. It suggests that a balance needs to be achieved
for companies to benefit from the efficiencies that process management
brings, and to still innovate effectively.
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Forrester article predicting a mild slowdown
before the next wave of technology investment.
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A niche technology is set to grow, especially as
real-time, scan-based environments continue to proliferate. By looking
into the message contents of events coming from single or multiple
event streams, the physical operation of the business can be monitored
- particularly for patterns - allowing pro-active decisions to be taken
while something can still be done.
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Monday 2nd January 2006
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This article discusses how Google is impacting the
perception of IT’s relevance and impact by delivering new capabilities
that once seemed to be too complex to deliver, and at a rate that is
faster than ever before.
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The UDDI Business Registry (UBR) that is operated
by IBM, Microsoft and SAP will shut down on 12th January 2006.
Apparently, their shared implementation of the specifications has now
proven interoperability and helped to refine the specification.
However, there is some speculation that it is also closed due to the
lack of governance over the entries in the UBR, where unmanaged content
was devaluing UDDI rather than promoting it.
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Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is not a new
concept, but it has come to the fore with the explosive growth of web
services. According to Gartner, SOA will become mainstream in
global companies by 2007. This article discusses SOA alongside other
approaches to IT Architecture and concludes that SOA is probably
neither Fad nor Silver Bullet, but an approach that every IT architect
should understand and be able to use as occasion demands.
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As the lines between business and IT become
increasingly blurred, new techniques such as service-oriented
architecture (SOA) place software developers at the heart of delivering
business strategy.
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This article explores the role of trust when
seeking to align IT with the business and provides some tips as to how
it can be developed.
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Monday 26th December 2005
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How SOA offers companies a way to increase
competitiveness. Discusses why EDI failed and the benefits of SOA over
EDI.
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According to a recent Gartner report, compliance
and governance will account for as much as 15% of 2006 enterprise IT
budgets. Enterprise Architecture plays an important part in ensuring
that compliance is achieved and is implemented consistently across the
enterprise. Delivering compliance through a series of point solutions
will lead to increased IT complexity and costs.
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To avoid extinction, CIOs must move from an
orientation that revolves around technology to one centered on business
processes.
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A service oriented architecture provides an
opportunity and motivation for taking another look at the security
mechanisms currently deployed in a business. In this article the author
challenges the reader to think about security-as-a-service within a
service-oriented architecture.
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This article discusses how the introduction of
Web Service technology may change the way that senior IT
decision-makers view technology vendors.
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Monday 19th December
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Buy-in from the organisation is a key factor in
the success of any EA initiative. Solutions for getting involvement
across the organisation can range from peer pressure to brute force.
This article explores five ways to make EA more attractive to the
organisation.
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A short article on how IT can gain credibility
within the organisation by showcasing its capabilities and successes.
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In this Gartner report, they explore how patterns
influence how architecture components deliver system capabilities to
the business. Understand the definitions of and distinctions among
patterns and see how they can strengthen your enterprise architecture.
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"Few people would consider business terms, such as
revenue, yield or cost, as intangible items. Likewise, data is not an
esoteric intangible". In this article the author suggests that
companies who understand their data ex ante - information for
management decision-making drives design - are one step ahead of the
game.
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This extensive article explores the application of
security to SOA and in particular a model that provides security as a
service. These security services can then be applied across the various
layers of the technology architecture, consistently and in a more
manageable manner.
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Monday 12th December
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This article is an interview with the Gartner vice
president, Andy Kyte, where he discusses his view on the future for IT.
More specifically, the change in emphasis from managing data to
providing just-in-time knowledge and insight in support of
differentiating processes.
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Investing in SOA may not be an obvious thing to do
for many non-IT executives. However, this article claims that SOA will
become a requirement for doing business in the future. Making the
investment today delivers a range of leader advantages that competitors
will be scrambling for later.
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A discussion of the FEA need for architectural
wide consistency and the role that Geospatial Information may play.
Those in the geospatial business have identified three areas as having
value for the government as a whole and not owned by a single Line of
Business. All departments have security needs, all of them perform
document management activities, and they all require geospatial
information and tools!
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Applications such as Microsoft Excel and Lotus
Notes help proliferate informal business applications. The applications
may solve problems for their enterprising users, but, in turn, they
create an enterprise-wide problem: the generation of information
outside a company's operational realm of data. In this article the
author suggests that service oriented technologies may be the answer;
providing business people with the flexibility to 'build' functionality
as they require it. However, managing the creation and proliferation of
services though Service Oriented Architecture will be paramount to its
success.
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Document describing the UK Government’s strategy
for IT. Discusses the desire to offer citizen’s choice and how the
government wants to move towards customer centric services, shared
services and to deliver a step-change in professionalism. The site also
has some interesting examples/scenarios that can be looked at.
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Monday 5th December
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Many major enterprises are also adopting service
oriented architecture and restructuring their existing application
resources to support real time business level services. The convergence
of SOA and real time IT infrastructure could make utility provisioning
of end to end business services management viable. This report
identifies the Business Service Network as an important trend and
assesses the strategic implications for enterprises.
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It is not difficult to get SOA wrong, especially
when the reasons for ‘doing’ SOA are either misunderstood or not
supported by management. The author of this InfoWorld blog proposes the
top 5 reasons for why SOA initiatives are failing to deliver as
promised.
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Do you really know the impact and cost of
application changes in your enterprise environment? This is the second
part of an
article featured in
October 2005 that takes a look at why a managed
meta data environment is becoming a critical enterprise information
resource for understanding the impact of change.
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Research shows that many IT projects fail to
produce the business transformation they're expected to mainly due to a
lack of buy-in from top management. This article discusses this and
ways to gain buy-in.
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Some companies, after spending millions of
dollars, have yanked the plug on their Business Intelligence (BI)
projects. BI was initially sold as a means of delivering deeper
performance insights, transforming and streamlining dysfunctional
operations and reducing risk. The author suggests that technology is
not entirely to blame and that ineffective architecture processes and
governance are a large part of the problem. A 10 point activity
checklist is put forward for those accountable for BI success.
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Monday 28th November
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Line56 review the take-up of SOA based on some
research by AMR. They present an exploration of the results of a recent
survey of how people are trying to implement SOA, along with a look at
what organisations should expect to gain from adopting SOA.
Importantly, Line56 point out that SOA cannot be delivered through a
discrete investment or strategy. This is an activity that impacts the
whole enterprise. However, contrary to the implication of the last
paragraph of this article, SOA is about architecture - (Service
Oriented ARCHITECTURE) - not the technology. Whether or not you will
succeed with SOA depends on how you use the technology, not just on
what technology you purchase.
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In this article a consultant with analyst group
Cutter Consortium contends there are at least seven best practices
organisations pursuing alignment initiatives should follow. Because
these practices are interrelated, skimping on any one of them might
doom the best-laid IT plans.
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"In the year ahead, Enterprise Architecture will
become a governing force in IT decision-making." Enterprise
Architecture might have been considered an "IT backwater" in the past
but by providing the visibility of how the business is supported by
applications, information and technology, EA is crucial to providing an
end-to-end view of the enterprise. With such a view, the implications
of any decision can be well understood and the results measured.
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Today, data integration occurs in the structured
world; a world made up of records, tables, attributes, indexes, and
other variables. However, we are now entering the world of unstructured
data: emails, telephone conversations, documents and the like. This
article suggests that trying to apply data integration techniques that
worked in the structured environment simply doesn’t work here.
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As companies look toward another year of
Sarbanes-Oxley reporting, automating security and access controls is
gaining top priority. This article highlights the fact that
organisations are starting to see the benefit of good governance and
tight regulatory control. So much so, that if SOX disappeared, many
would continue to pursue its requirements.
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Monday 21st November
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This article discusses an SOA implementation at an
end user organisation. As part of the strategy team, EAS were
responsible for defining the vision for the implementation of SOA and
the architecture of the SOA infrastructure.
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This article discusses how a computer game is
being used to reveal some of the secrets of successful communication.
There is some interesting learning which is applicable to communicating
architecture in the article.
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AMR Research recently hosted a debate between
Nicholas Carr, author of Does IT Matter?; Eric Brynjolfsson, director
of MIT's Center for eBusiness; Linda S. Sanford, Snr VP in IBM; and AMR
Research CEO Tony Friscia. They concluded that IT does matter - sort
of. Companies that do benefit from creative use of technology have a
clear understanding of what the technology can and does do for them.
The complexity of even medium sized organisations means that a
framework for understanding what capabilities the technology delivers
to the business is required. Enterprise Architecture, anyone?
Line56 sum up the results in this article
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Many analysts expected insourcing to be a
short-term trend, a low-level trickle in reaction to the poor
performance of specific outsourcing contracts. But the volume of
businesses moving IT services back in-house suggests that this is more
than a passing fad. Suppliers, it would seem, are in for a rough ride
according to the author of this article.
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The tendency among organizations to continually
add new performance metrics without retiring old ones is ultimately
self-defeating. This article discusses some key considerations;
deciding how many metrics you should have, how often the data should be
refreshed, and how to avoid conflicting metrics.
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Monday 14th November
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This article discusses an SOA implementation at an
end user organisation. As part of the strategy team, EAS were
responsible for defining the vision for the implementation of SOA and
the architecture of the SOA infrastructure.
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Talks through the elements of a practical process
modelling framework, a key element of any business architecture.
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In the same week that OpenOffice.org announced the
release of OpenOffice.org 2.0, some initial results from the European
Commission-funded COSPA project have been published. This research
project is expected to publish its findings on migrations to
OpenOffice.org and Linux desktop by the end of the year. More than just
investigating free software migrations, the Consortium for Open Source
in Public Administration has developed porting tools for proprietary
databases. The ability to continue to make use of desktop hardware that
is now unable to run Windows XP is a recurring theme in this study.
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Compliance and business performance lead distinct
but inseparable lives, connected by risk and sharing common data
lifeblood. In this article, five architectural initiatives are proposed
that will help to reconcile these differences within a coherent IT
architecture.
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This article, targeted at CIOs and Senior IT
Managers, provides a high level description of Service-based
Integration and the rationale for its (re-)emergence as an approach for
flexible, efficient enterprise integration.
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Monday 7th November 2005
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The role of the chief financial officer in an
enterprise has been undergoing a radical change for some time now. What
do today's CEOs expect from their CFOs? How does this impact on the
role of CFOs and the finance organisation? What "finance
transformation" strategies do they apply to enable finance to meet the
challenges of the future?
One of SAP's Chief Solution Architects identifies the main capabilities
required for the new CFO role and suggests an approach for this
preparation. Defining of a vision for the future in terms of conceptual
capabilities (a Conceptual Business Architecture) is vital before
starting to define how these capabilities will be provided and what can
and will be automated (a Logical Business Architecture).
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Article arguing that within the US government EA
is seen as an administrative hurdle, but that this view is due to the
absence of high-level direction to drive program management and
enterprise architecture group collaboration. Although it focuses on
federal initiatives, the problem is applicable to a lot of EA
initiatives outside of the federal government.
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Terms such as grid, on-demand, and
service-oriented architecture are mired in confusion, but there is an
overarching trend behind them all. This article describes the
much needed transformation of IT from vertically integrated silos
towards horizontally integrated, service-oriented enterprise systems.
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There is power in knowledge. When you understand
the terms that your business uses to conduct business and you
understand how those terms impact your business, you can see clearly
how to support and maintain the processes that use those terms with
minimal effort. In this article, the author argues the case for
capturing semantics as a pre-requisite to modelling the enteprise.
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This article describes the SOA Maturity Model that
has been developed by Sonic Software, Systinet, AmberPoint and
BearingPoint with representatives from the participating companies
explaining the rationale behind its creation.
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Monday 31st October 2005
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Service-oriented architecture offers a rational
approach to building applications that meet business needs.
The tenets of SOA contain an inherent simplicity and rational design
that many, if not most, application portfolios sorely lack.
This article describes the big opportunities that SOA can offer, and
recognises the many challenges that lay in its path.
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This article describes how Enterprise Architecture
can be used to enable the visibility required for compliance with
Sarbanes-Oxley. In this case the Zachmann framework is used to
demonstrate the benefits.
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OASIS have recently announced that the Web
Services Transaction Technical Committee has put the final piece of the
WS-* (or WS-STAR) suite in place. WS-* is the set of Web Service
protocols required to enable secure, reliable, asynchronous
transactions to be conducted between participants. WS-Security has been
around for some time, and for WS-Reliable Exchange (WS-RX) a Technical
Committee was formed earlier this year. In this article, the CBDi Forum
consider whether WS-Transaction (WS-TX) will start a convergence in the
activites of overlapping standards.
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Do you really know the impact and cost of
application changes in your enterprise environment? This article looks
at some of the common misconceptions typically seen at firms that do
not consider meta data to be a critical component of their overall
enterprise solution.
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An interesting paper that talks through the role
enterprise architects can play in projects.
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Monday 24th October 2005
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IT executives are often not involved in boardroom
strategy discussions. This article discusses the views of 12
IT directors on why this should change.
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Although this article is one for the more
technically oriented, sometimes it helps to explore a bit more detail
to understand the what the technology can and (more importantly) cannot
do. These two articles from Oracle's OTN provide a thorough and
detailed introduction into one of the hot technologies of Business
Process Integration and Web Services - WS-BPEL (also known as BPEL or
BPEL4WS).
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ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) will
probably generate more hype than all high-tech buzzwords of the past
five years combined. This article looks at the concept of ILM in more
detail to determine whether it really does add true value.
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A report on how a number of companies are bringing
their outsourced IT back in house.
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Banks are making increasing use of
service-oriented architecture and business-process management as they
seek to deepen customer relationships.
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Monday 17th October 2005
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Describes the nature and role of Enterprise
Architecture from the perspective of a data professional. It provides a
definition of Enterprise Architecture and some principles that should
be considered when introducing EA into an organisation.
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There are many conflicting reports on the level of
SOA adoption by organisations.
While it is likely that many people still mistakenly believe that
because they are using Web Services that they are doing SOA, the 2005
CIO Connect/SAS Census reports that only 35% of the CIOs that were
surveyed considered SOA to represent potential business benefit - half
the number that were excited by BPM.
This article by the CBDi Forum recommends some activities for moving
beyond tyre-kicking and taking the next steps towards adopting SOA.
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Research by the Office of National Statistics
(ONS) and the London School of Economics (LSE) shows that technology
has a positive impact on business productivity.
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Increased confidence in future business and
economic climates is reflected in new technology investment.
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BI and data warehousing, weighed down by limited
perspectives about how to integrate information, must be adjusted. The
tonic is semantic integration and ontology, which blend data with
richer meaning and context.
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Monday 10th October 2005
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There is a major problem in that digital documents
become unreadable as technology becomes obsolete. So documents held on
computers today will probably be unreadable in 100 years time (or
sooner). This article discusses the problem and how a solution using a
simulated computer may be the answer.
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This article provides a perspective on the role of
Enterprise Architecture in the delivery of Service Oriented
Architecture in large organisations.
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The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has declared
that from January 2007, all all documents used by Massachusetts state
government agencies must be stored in open formats. Approved formats
include PDF and OpenDocument but notably any MS Office formats.
Interestingly, a Microsoft executive has protested that by insisting on
the use of the OpenDocument format, Massachusetts have created a
monopoly since the office suites that support OpenDocument are all
derivatives from StarOffice.
In this related link, the
KOffice developers set the record straight.
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Analyst house Gartner has hit out at companies who
are allowing their techies to dictate how the organisation secures
itself and has called upon businesses to mature and embrace strategic
rather than technical thinking.
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This article discusses the view that outsoucing to
offshore companies will continue to grow and that innovation, both in
the UK and in the offshore markets is the key to success.
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Monday 3rd October 2005
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Although this is largely due to the immaturity of
the market and the products, implementing an SOA requires a clear
vision of what you are building not just buying the right technology.
After two full years of hype, suppliers and analysts are still debating
terminology and the necessary components for SOA. Service integration
engines, such as SAP's NetWeaver, or Oracle Integration have so far
made little impact on users who do not already use the supplier's
applications.
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Story on how the FBI EA effort is suffering, “it
remains at risk of developing systems that do not effectively and
efficiently support mission operations and performance."
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Many have lost faith in the accuracy of the
reports that land on their desks; poor data quality most frequently
taking the blame. This article suggests that data quality is only part
of the problem and that a lack of understanding of data semantics - the
meaning of data - may be the root cause.
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Brief article on the need to be able to describe
IT in business language.
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A brief look at how getting a handle on customer
data will lead to customer satisfaction.
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Monday 26th September 2005
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This article explains how EA can act as a key
decision support tool to strategic IT competencies such as Financial
Controls, Project Portfolio Mgt and Regulatory Compliance.
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IT managers are having to cope not only with
complex information across the organisation, but also the trend of
outsourced resources, partnerships, alliances and contractors. This
article concludes that IT staff need to move up the intellectual
property scale in order to become designers and architects.
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Why an SOA approach needs to be thought out
properly.
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Although not yet accepted as a realistic
proposition, quantum computing promises to free computing from the
constraints of Moore's law. However, this power would be a hacker's
dream - rendering all current security measures useless. That is, until
quantum theory is applied to encryption and data is transmitted via
packets of light...
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A single instance of ERP may sound ideal but may
actually not be best for the business. A good architecture should help
you work it out.
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