Week 10: Similar Activities & EA tools

Is this the last one of EA Blog? Am I running my Blog too fast? Why when I get the topic of Week9&10 after I have done the Week9... Sorry I have to mix both topics into this one.

Related Activities

Talking about other activities similar to EA and Business-IT alignment, the first word come to my mind is SOA. As I mentioned in my first blog SOA is the process of representing what the business does in the context of the structure of the systems, which are comprised of components or building blocks, the externally visible properties of those components and the relationships among them.

SOA by itself is not an architecture but a service-orientation style that helps EA work better. SOA increase stakeholders' participation and EA product acceptance. Also SOA enables EA be envisioned, planned and modeled more easily. Therefore EA can be more economical.

As I once read, there is a great metaphor between SOA and retail stores.

When we shop at a canteen we can see goods through the counter and just ask the salesperson for what we want. Simple and primitive, like many businesses in their early digitized days. Different departments use their own IT systems. Since the sales and data volume is not that much, individual system works with acceptable efficiency.

With the development of society, canteen owners found themselves unable to meet the people's growing demand, so the department stores emerged, and people get used to shop at department stores. Likewise with business development, separated systems failed to meet the needs of business requirement, so the integrated system came into being.

Later come chain supermarkets. Modern logistics saves us time and energy from running different stores for one shopping lists now. EA and SOA brought a major change in business too.

Activities like EA and SOA integrated and reuse all enterprise resources (similar to the one-stop supermarket shopping), build a better platform for users. Based on the good integrated enterprise system on SOA (supermarket), a variety of assets, so good reuse of existing assets. Service is invoked among various systems therefore the entire system is encapsulated as a whole.

EA Tools

 Defined by the The Gartner Group, an EA tool is made up of:(source)

• A repository
• A meta model that supports business, information and technology viewpoints as well as the solution architecture
• Provides support within the repository for relationships among and between the objects in the above viewpoints and solution architecture
• The ability to create or import models and artifacts
• The ability to extract repository information to support various stakeholder needs.

There exist many tools in the market useful in EA planning, controlling and streamlining.

The Gartner Group evaluated various Tools in a quadrant. 

The two main criteria Gartner used are "ability to execute" and "completeness of vision", shown in following tables:

Commercial EA tools are costly, such as IBM Rational System Architect. For example, suggested retail price of a User License of Rational System Architect is USD $4,190.00 in the US and AUD $7,227.75 in Australia.

Meanwhile some of them are free and open-source, for example the Essential Project and MappIT. Or simpler some architects just use MS office and UML diagrams. Followed is a survey of EA tools used in architects, which I considered as interesting.

Does those expensive EA tools matter? I am not that sure.

According to IBM, their tool provides the capabilities to support transformation planning, IT investment management and impact analysis to manage the risks in the execution of these initiatives for organizations going through mergers and acquisition, consolidation and cost reduction initiatives. Also, for organizations with the goals of streamlining their business and turning strategy into execution, their tool provides the capabilities for decision support, process optimization, and integration into solution delivery to enable them to efficiently reach these goals. Basically, it is a platform for visualizing, analyzing and communicating.

So EA tools do help enhance the effeciency of organizations, but only within organizations with a certain scale EA tools can show its value.