Enterprise Architecture Tools: What is in the Enterprise Mind?

Enterprise Architecture is now turning into a land of opportunities. A group of people have landed into this widely misunderstood Enterprise territory with their all skilled resources and started a virtual retail market to encourage selling of all the products...

Enterprise Architecture is now turning into a land of opportunities. A group of people have landed into this widely misunderstood Enterprise territory with their all skilled resources and started a virtual retail market to encourage selling of all the products playing with better English words labelling as “Enterprise” + their choice of words like “Architecture”, “Tool”, “Modelling Tool” and so on. Industry is now in a programmed washing machine where tool vendors are controlling the spinning and rinsing the enterprise mind. Agile enterprise is in search of true leadership in this regard. Industry believes in horoscope quadrants and helping themselves to be diverted by those astrologers who themselves are running another string of these enterprise marketplace. Since the stone ages, people are in search of tool aid to make life simpler. Enterprise is no exception which in search of the “Patch Adams” who looks beyond our four fingers and helps others to improve the quality of enterprise productivity. In our next few issues we are in an objective of Tran-analysis of available market leaders Enterprise Tools and understand how these magicians are trying to interfere enterprise mind.

Mind of Enterprise Architecture

Multi-facade enterprise architecture has a wide variety of ontology. However the trans analysis of Enterprise brain reveals rather simplistic chambers with a few mandatory cells as follows:

• Enterprise Architecture Framework
• Enterprise Master Plan
• Enterprise Vision
• Enterprise Life Cycle
• Enterprise Life History
• Enterprise Process
• Enterprise Tools
• Enterprise Modeling
• Different type of Governance
• Enterprise Portfolio
• Business and IT alignment
• Economic Benefit of Enterprise Architecture

  Enterprise Mind similar to human one follows the same rule and is always looking out for a rescue tool that may help in resolving most of those bullet points. Here is a simple illustration of Enterprise Mind:

  Enterprise Mind: How do we see a complete elephant picture of a true enterprise?

  Enterprise is neither a scrabble board nor just a word puzzle in a daily newspaper. It is a real life puzzle that completes the “Canis Major” in an Enterprise sky. Enterprise Architecture branded tool vendors should learn that at the first place. Drawing is different than modelling, and it is expected that in an expensive tools, people would expect lot more than just few good diagrams and bundled them into so called repository without any genuine value.

  Figure 1: EA Sky

  

  In our next section we will create a tool evaluation template that is based on different enterprise architecture best practice recommendations and then in our next few issues we will evaluate few qualified tools against this evaluation template to understand the Enterprise Architecture Tool vendor illusionists.

  Enterprise Architecture Tool Expectations

  In our daily life we start our day with tools. So it is simple that we all know what we expect from a tool. It is not very simple to get the same questioned answered by any enterprise big brother tool vendors. We all are very sure that we will get countless answers. In this section we will try to put our efforts to list down our expectations from a tool that is branded as “Enterprise Tool”. Our one united expectation will be getting a end-to-end versatile picture of the enterprise spaces with a greater depth and breadth coverage of best practice guidelines to develop enterprise architecture. Business strategy validation would be another nice to have feature within any enterprise tool. Here is a list of some other expected features:

• Suggestive architectural approach or standards (RM-ODP, 4+1 views, TOGAF etc)

• Methodology selection guidelines (EUP, RUP etc)

• Enterprise Classification Framework usage (Harmony, Zachman etc)

• Suggestive Enterprise Views and Viewpoints (GERAM views, TOGAF views, RM-ODP Viewpoints etc)

• Enterprise Roadmaps

• Integration approaches and their tradeoffs

• Standard ontology so that business and IT people can be in sync

• Economic benefit analysis (AIE, NPV etc calculation)

• Differentiating between Enterprise Architecture and Solution architecture

• Enterprise governance approaches

• Enterprise artefacts and their traceability

• Modelling of CIM layers (first layer of MDA)

• UML models exports and imports

• Model and Artefact repository

• Architecture Trade-off analysis

Our current industry market place has experienced several leading Enterprise Architecture tool set. We have kept a considerable budget approved in a safe vault to use them against the tool set predicted by industry analyst astrologers. We have booked our diary to attend several web inner that are sponsored by those tool vendors and get influenced by them. However we have never thought about the byte size message that they are spreading across the community. This below mentioned diagram depicts the wise vision of the Enterprise Architecture.

Figure 2: Enterprise Architecture roadmap.

Ever since we acquired initial knowledge about enterprise architecture, we have heard of or

experienced the existence of different schools of thought. These schools show characteristics similar to the fabled blind men trying to explain the parts of an elephant. They concentrate only on certain parts of the enterprise and use their own methods to make enterprise mind work. Our objective is to keep a safe distance from these players.

Figure 3: IEEE 1471-2000 adapted version of enterprise architecture

In our figure 2 we have shown an abstraction path of the enterprise architecture roadmap an adapted and extended version GERAM recommendations. We have chosen this GERAM based roadmap as it is the only reference roadmap available in the market that truly explains the enterprise nature. In our Figure 3 we have provided an adapted IEEE 1471-2000 version of the Enterprise Architecture definition that completes the definition side of enterprise architecture.

Now considering all available schools of thought we will now provide an EA tool evaluation roadmap that helps us to understand the capability of any EA Tools within the enterprise context.

Enterprise Architecture Tool Evaluation Template

This table does not include those other features like support, cost, and platform and so on, which are common to any tools.

We will evaluate few market leader tools in upcoming issues and will guide you through their capabilities and will explain how an illusionist industry has taken over the market and governing the enterprise decision makers and spreading the hallucination.

Reference

• GERAM: Generalized Enterprise Reference Architecture and Methodology. Version 1.6.3. Also in P. Bernus, L. Nemes and G. Schmidt (Eds) Handbook on Enterprise Architecture, Berlin : Springer (2003) pp 22-64: http://www.cit.gu.edu.au/~bernus/taskforce/geram
• Strategic Alignment: Leveraging information technology for transforming operations by J C Henderson and N Venkatraman, IBM System Journal, Vol 32, No 1, 1993, Page 4-16
• Strategy as a creation of corporate future by Brane Kalpic, Krsto Pandza and Peter Bernus, Chapter 4, P 213-279 in Handbook on Enterprise Architecture, Chapter by Bernus, P., Nemes, L. and G. Schmidt (eds.) , Springer, (2003), ISBN is 3540003436
• Developing the enterprise concepts – The business Plan by Arturo Molina, Chapter 9, P 333-369 in Handbook on Enterprise Architecture, Chapter by Bernus, P., Nemes, L. and G. Schmidt (eds.) , Springer, (2003), ISBN is 3540003436
• Handbook on Enterprise Architecture, by Bernus, P., Nemes, L. and G. Schmidt (eds.) , Springer, (2003), ISBN is 3540003436
• Enterprise Architecture at Work : Modelling, Communication and Analysis by Marc Lankhorst, Springer, 2005, ISBN: 3540243712
• An architecture for defining the processes of the software and systems life cycles by Terence P. Rout, Software Quality Institute and Peter Bernus, School of Computing and Information Technology, Griffith University Queensland, Australia.
• TOGAF
• MDA Radar
• A HANDBOOK ON MASTER PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTATION FOR ENTERPRISE INTEGRATION PROGRAMS Based On The Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture and the Purdue Methodology Purdue Laboratory for Applied Industrial Control Edited by Theodore J. Williams, Gary A. Rathwell, Hong Li. February 2001 (Revised from July 1999 PERA website version)
• [Becoming a Technical Leader] Becoming a Technical Leader: An Organic Problem-Solving Approach (Paperback) by Gerald M. Weinberg, Dorset House Publishing, ISBN: 0-932633-02-1

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