Week 8: EA methodologies and Flower4all project

This week’s lecture Prof. Murli talks about the concrete methodology of EA. (God knows how long I have been praying for something concrete!) We use the EA3 as our example so the methodology is a four phase/ twenty-step one, from establishing the program to a long-term maintenance. 

I am currently working on my project “Flowers4All” and really want to apply this methodology to my project. But I think I have to tell some truth: sometimes EA frameworks and methodologies confuse me a lot, seriously. And it is so frustrating. 

In Week 4 I have mentioned about comparisons between different frameworks, their strengths and shortcomings. Zachman framework is only a taxonomy while TOGAF is more like a process; FEA is a comprehensive methodology working better in Government; Gartner provides a good practice, but I just feel it is too dependent to particular specialists. I believe that all of them are good frameworks but I somehow just feel they are vague, especially the last one which seems have received most commendations. Gartner is a bit like a hospital, the users as patients, they trust the experience of world top specialists. Architects would have things done well but how they deal with different situations depends on years of experience in real work. Here comes that problem. The experience is unique and intangible. For me, I don’t have their experience at all, so their work is like a black box. I know with input, there will magically be a good output. But what happened inside? I don’t know. It is never my practice.

It is also another blog by the author’s friend, another EA architect, talking about why all these four frameworks are incomplete if work separately. In the end the blogger said the best practice should based on particular business strategic objectives. He thought architects should always be innovative and find their own way.

There is a non-profit educational corporation, One World Information System (OWIS), develop a methodology called "General Enterprise Management"™ (GEM™) which can integrate existing information systems, provide the foundation for applications for new information processing requirements, or subsume existing information systems during their next redesign or redevelopment. A part of the GEM methodology that guides the development and maintenance of an Enterprise Architecture (EA) can be used as basic enterprise architecture methodology (BEAM)™. 
Here is a PDF file features the baisc elements of BEAM. The generally methodology and concrete steps are presented in this picture.

It also have a Procedural Flowchart.

For the flower4all project, I have study the case of Dell's EA with Oracle.

The framework they used is the Oracle Enterprise Architecture Framework which consists of seven core components.

With the approach recommended by Oracle, Dell firstly established a blueprint to guide their projects, structuring the enterprise into strategy, goals, objectives, operating model, capabilities, business processes, information assets, and governance. Also they divided the architecture into four parts: business, information, application, and infrastructure. Using the blueprint, they inventoried all applications and the underlying technology, to map the applications to business capabilities to identify omissions and redundancies.

While compared to Dell the Flower4all is a small company. It has only three division of business, the interacting parties are relatively limited. After compared those methodology I would prefer the EA cube, to clarify the LOBs(Productions&Service) of Flower4all and crosscutting components that might be shared by different function groups.
In the EA cube framework each LOB is made up by (up-bottom): Strategic Initiatives, Business Processes, Information Flows, Systems &Services, Technology Infrastructures.
In the material we have their SI and BP, with unsorted information flows, so I think my job should focus on sorting the Information flows of the BP first. Then decide how those information flows among different systems and servers. Finally identify where the gaps exist.

For our SA project, this week we finally work out the outline and signed parts for different persons. I provided materials for each member to read, which I hope can be useful for us. (You know materials... They look useful at first, but never judge a material based on its title...)