Part 1- What is Enterprise Architecture?
So, for some reason that shall not be discussed – I have started bloggin 
Honestly this is a good thing. Writing something down kinda lets you process your thoughts better… so I am glad I did start.
So, I am going to try to articulate (primarily to myself) on what this discipline of Enterprise Architecture (EA) is and how can businesses put it to work in a actionable way. So, if you are passionate about EA, or you think I could use some grown up advice – feel free to leave a comment or send me a personal message 
Im planning to do one post per week…..So here goes…….
What is Enterprise Architecture?
Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a discipline of describing a Enterprise as a whole in a structured format. Enterprise Architecture is not software architecture – or system architecture – or Service oriented architecture (SOA).
Grady Booch compares EA and Technical Architecture (TA) in one of his blog posts as “EA attends to the architecture of a business that uses technology; TA attends to the architecture of the software-intensive systems that support the business”.
An Enterprise can be a business corporation, a government entity such as a town municipality, or a defense organization like the Army, Navy or Air force of a country. An Enterprise can be composed of
1. Business objectives
2. Targets and goals
3. Business processes
4. People
5. Software applications
6. Computer hardware
7. Networks
8. Business specific assets (War ships, hotel rooms, books, electronic parts etc)
This discipline has existed since the late 1980s. But, 2 decades later, its still nascent in its broader adoption particularly in the commercial world (Other wise I would not need to write this post). The Defense world has been using EA for some time now.
Once the Enterprise is described, various methodologies and tools can be used to analyze the structure of the enterprise, visualize transformation scenarios, depict interconnections and dependencies; pictorially or simply list in a table.
Charts, lists, graphs, drawings, models are artifacts of an Enterprise Architecture exercise. Enterprise Architecture is not modeling in itself. These artifacts put together can “describe” an enterprise and help in understand and communicate business impact in transformation scenarios. It also serves to build a search-able inventory of business aspects (business divisions, work groups, business applications, business processes, business services, machines etc)
BTW – I will be probably be talking about this at Innovate Bangalore – so if you want to participate in this discussion be at Innovate Bangalore 2011 where you will also see the new version of IBM Rational System Architect in action – this is a EA tool that IBM offers.
As posted on this link.
You can register for Innovate 2011 here.
The last few posts have been talking about the different product offerings in the IBM Rational portfolio. They help in automation of processes designed after years of extensive research based on interaction with customers and real world implementations. This helps in designing effective solutions for the real world problems faced by businesses today. All this information has been collated into two process frameworks catering specifically to agile software delivery teams. They are the Measured Capability Improvement Framework and Rational Practices.
Measured Capability Improvement Framework (MCIF)
The MCIF helps business owners and key stakeholders understand if the new approach adopted is delivering or not. This helps teams to continuously improve and innovate their software and systems delivery with the help of measurement and continuous improvement. MCIF also helps teams specialize and develop key competencies in agile development – practices which directly contribute towards business objectives.
Rational practices
The IBM Rational Method Composer helps agile teams with the right amount of leeway while dealing with processes, when they need it by providing Rational Practices. Irrespective of expertise level of the team, Rational Practices provides a customized approach to the various iterations of the Software Development Life Cycle and delivers more consistent results, quicker.
Read more on the IBM Rational Page.
Innovate in coming to your town. The buzz is everywhere; everyone’s talking about the biggest premier event of the year. Immense noise, enthusiasm, and commendable presence, but why would you attend the conference?
Here’s a list why. The top 5 reasons to attend Innovate 2011:
1. Get Skilled
Technical and interactive sessions across several technical tracks with focus on IT, systems, security, customer stories and much more
Hands-on workshops for hands-on training with IBM products for your entire software lifecycle
IBM Certification Testing
2. Get Informed
Hear inspiring, educational and innovate keynotes
Learn how to transform your company’s software innovation and accelerate better business outcomes
Leading technology and research experts share product demonstrations and their insights on software innovation
3. Get Smarter
Learn how IBM’s smarter systems and software can play a role as a key accelerator in your company’s growth
See how IBM Rational gives you a competitive edge to achieve precision in desired business outcomes
Learn better ways to innovate, collaborate, automate and report
4. Get Savings
Get one year’s worth of education in two days
Early Bird Offer! Register by July 4th and Save Big
Avail huge discounts on Group registration
One-stop technical education opportunity
Get certified in the You Pass We Pay model
And, last, but in no way the least..
5. Network and Meet Worldwide Experts Including IBM Executive!
Network and innovate with top executives, architects and peers
Participate in interactive sessions and conference activities to exchange ideas and information on innovative products and services
Visit the Innovation Labs and Hands-on
So, what are you waiting for? Yeah, all the noise and buzz are worth it. Grab your chance to Smarter products powered by smarter software to drive successful businesses.
Register Now!
The premier event for software and systems innovation, Innovate is back. This year the event in India will take place in two cities, Delhi and Bangalore.
Needless to remind that, software is best developed by a team of people, reacting and responding to each other in order to achieve the best outcome. So, grab your chance to let IBM Rational escalate your profits through the roof. Reap rich benefits by integrating people, processes and data and facilitating team collaboration profit from a smarter software by participating in Innovate 2011.
Witness to believe how smarter products powered by software scale businesses shoot up the profit chart. Joins us in Bangalore on August 10-11, 2011 and Delhi on August 11, 2011, for Innovate 2011: Software. Everyware, the Rational Software Developer Conference.
Click here to register for the event
In our previous post, we spoke about the Jazz platform. There are other offerings from Rational which can positively impact the entire software development and delivery process. Various tools contribute towards different stages of the software development lifecycle. Capabilities like architecture management, change and release management, enterprise architecture management, requirements management, product, project and portfolio management, quality management and targeted solutions are all features of the various products in the Rational portfolio.
These capabilities can help you model and develop superior software and systems, enhance software delivery and lifecycle traceability throughout the entire SDLC and help you make the correct decisions to drive your business forward. Requirement management, alignment of business goals, adoption of best practices and assuring functionality, reliability, security and compliance are all possible with the Rational portfolio.
To read more, visit the IBM Rational page.
One of the key tenets of IBM is to enable business innovation and agility. To develop both systems and operations, a large investment of time, people and money is required. To enable sustained growth, differentiation and innovation, software should be treated as an investment and an asset. It should also be treated as such. The growth of software is extensive and interconnected with highly intelligent programs and instrumented products coexist and contribute to the same network. To deliver software effectively, innovation must be enabled, costs lowered and change should be managed.
This is not possible with an ad-hoc approach to software management. Software delivery should be approached with the same stringent expectations as those of other processes. As a business process, it should be tracked, reviewed and revised as required.
IBM Rational’s offerings help make software delivery a core strength for your business. With offerings like processes, capabilities and a cohesive, collaborative platform, the pathway to success is set on a solid foundation.
Find out more here.
Innovation is often the key differentiation for organizations in the marketplace. To gain majority marketshare, fatter profits and industry leader status, organizations must innovate constantly. In fact, innovation is so important that 94% of C – Level executives surveyed place innovation as one of the top priorities for their organization.
Despite the importance placed on innovation, often the results leave the business owners dissatisfied – Over 45% of the owners are unsure or unhappy with the results of their organizations’ collaboration and innovation drives.
Approaching innovation as a chaotic, amorphous cloud cannot yield appropriate results. Complete usage of available opportunities is only possible if the entire process of innovation is structured and managed. Each step of the process – ideation, evaluation, selection, prioritization and implementation, should be made measurable to boost and improve the quality of the results of the innovation exercise at the enterprise level.
Social innovation is a viable channel to benefit from the wisdom of the masses. Involving customers in the product development process results in the most successful products and integrate them into the core processes. Furthermore, as a tried and tested method, these organizations are also innovating the methods and channels adopted to engage and connect with the customers.
Not every idea is a great one. That is par for the course, considering innovation. To manage innovation effectively, each idea as an investment. Apart from collating the ideas, a structured process to differentiate the ideas is essential. Adoption of systemic processes and tools can greatly enhance the tangible results of various innovation innovatives.
Some of the benefits of managing innovation are:
- Enhanced, targeted decision making
- Aligning product offerings and business objectives
- Enhanced value delivered for customers
- Removal of Redundancy
- Improved ROI
A performance test creation, execution and analysis tool for validating application scalability and reliability
Slow performing application code is one situation, if given a chance, we would never encounter. But also, this issue needs some serious identification and redress, escaping is not an option.
Rational Application Performance Analyzer enables users to identify this slow performing application code.
However, we also are more than aware that finding performance bottlenecks is often not enough. In order to address performance bottlenecks, software delivery teams need to identify the cause as well. This becomes imperative in taking corrective actions. So what does a software team need to do?
- Enable identification of slow performing source code to pinpoint exact location of performance problems
- Extend Performance Tester to enable identification of the cause of system performance bottlenecks for J2EE applications
- Provide comprehensive graphical reports to Rational Performance Tester for bottleneck analysis
So why IBM Rational Application Performance Analyzer?
Let me try to answer this with few of the unique highlighted pick points of the product.
Features and Benefits:
Find and diagnose the cause of performance problems
Rational Application Performance Analyzer goes beyond problem identification to problem diagnosis. Using Root Cause Analysis features, you can identify both the source code and physical application tier that is causing the bottleneck.
Graphical Reports
A wide variety of graphical and table based reports are available to pinpoint the exact location of system performance bottlenecks.
Support for IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic
IBM Rational Application Performance Analyzer supports J2EE applications running on BEA Weblogic and IBM WebSphere application servers
Create UML Sequence diagrams based on actual running source code
With the generated UML sequence diagrams you can trace all activity that occurred just prior to the bottleneck to truly enable you to address the root cause of your performance problem.
Regardless of whether your clients are delivering software for IT, systems, enterprise modernization, or any combination of these, IBM Rational has the ALM solution your clients need.
In a recent report, ‘Decision Matrix: Selecting an Application Lifecycle Management Vendor,’ from industry analyst Ovum, states that “IBM has the broadest and arguably the deepest portfolio among all vendors profiled in this report.” With a Technology Score of 94.3% and a perfect market impact score of 10/10, all other vendors were ranked relative to IBM!
The report goes on to state that “the vendor has ensured that it stays ahead of the pack by having a good grasp of market demand and meeting it through tool support”.
Figure 1. Decision Matrix: Selecting an Application Lifecycle Management Vendor © Ovum (Published 03/2011) Page 14. This report is a licensed product and is not to be photocopied.
In the 2010 Gartner Inc. report on “MarketScope for Application Lifecycle Management”, analysts – Duggan, Jim & Murphy, Thomas E., have each stated that “ALM is what enables sustainable agile practices. ALM creates a management framework providing consistent, auditable records of the decisions and activities of agile teams”
“Efficient coordination and automation of the delivery process requires new, collaborative approaches to the planning, measurement, execution, control and reporting of activities.”
“These new approaches are what differentiate current application life cycle management (ALM) tools, and what make ALM processes vital to leading-edge development activities.”
(Ref: Duggan, Jim & Murphy, Thomas E., “Market Scope for Application Lifecycle Management,” Gartner, Inc., 11 November 2010 ID Number: G00208572, pp. 2,6)
Fig. 2 IBM Rational earns “Strong Positive” with the highest possible rating from Gartner
Analysts Tony Baer, Chandranshu Singh, and Michael Azoff worked with Rational team to review numerous written submissions, briefings, and client references. The result? In terms of market impact and technology, they concluded that IBM Rational is the market leader! And they also determined that IBM Rational demonstrates clear leadership in market presence!
The BigLever Gears Software Product Line (SPL) Lifecycle Framework provides a common set of industry-standard SPL concepts and constructs to enable the integration of existing or new tools, assets and processes across the full system and software development lifecycle – from business case and analysis, to requirements, design, implementation, testing, delivery, maintenance and evolution.
What does BigLever say?
“BigLever provides enhanced off-the-shelf integration solutions that support seamless product line engineering across the systems and software development lifecycle. BigLever’s product offering includes a broad range of solutions for IBM Rational, Serena, Microsoft, Perforce and Open Source development tools.
BigLever’s integration solutions utilize Gears concepts and constructs to extend third party tools and ensure consistent SPL capabilities directly from the framework.
BigLever’s Bridge solutions make third party tools “product line aware” by incorporating standardized variation point mechanisms and enabling the execution of SPL operations – such as product configuration, variation point editing and variation impact analysis – directly from within third party tools.”
By integrating IBM’s Jazz-based Rational Quality Manager into BigLever Software’s SPL Lifecycle Framework, the new RQM/Gears Bridge enables development organizations to define test case diversity based on product line features and to manage test plans as first-class product line assets in the SPL development lifecycle.
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