Earlier today, The Open Group formally announced its new professional association for enterprise architects.  I had the opportunity to speak with Allen Brown, The Open Group's CEO, last week about the association (AOGEA), enterprise architects as city planners, business architecture, and membership qualifications.   Sadly, I don't qualify for full membership, because I'm not TOGAF or ITAC certified, but there are other levels (associate and affiliate) for enterprise architects (and enterprise architect types) interested in joining.

Allen Brown shared that the primary drivers in escalating the role of the EA:

• "The breaking down of barriers within and between enterprises demands a city planner perspective of the enterprise architecture
• Enterprises need assurance that the staff or service providers they hire have the skills and experience necessary to address the complexities of enterprise architecture
• Professional enterprise architects need a recognized, portable and professional grade qualification"

Since Gian Trotta has a post and podcast on the AOGEA, I'm just going to skip ahead into 'enterprise architects as city planners'.  I hope to have information on The Open Group's Business Architecture working group in a couple of weeks.

In our conversation on enterprise architects as city planners, I shared that whenever my father asked me what I did (as a chief architect) I said, "think of it like city planning for business applications".  That would resonate.  And move my father along to how his Yankees beat my Red Sox, or vice versa. I'm sure other enterprise architects have had similar conversations.

I also shared with Allen Brown that I just read a fabulous, unpublished, paper by Annie Shum of BEA on "Connecting the Dots".  Annie's paper covers a range of topics -- meta-principles, fractals, complexity containment, services, SOA, networks of networks, grids of grids -- along with one of her favorite metaphors: SOA and city planning.  Annie has graciously given me permission to excerpt (liberally) from her paper.  What follows are some of Annie's thoughts on SOA, enterprise architects and city planning.  Enjoy!

"...Perhaps one of the most instructive metaphors for SOA is the process of city planning. As I wrote in my SOA & City Planning paper, city planning is not concerned with the design and construction of individual buildings. Rather, it is concerned with the multi-aspect relationship of individual buildings to one another, to the areas of the city/community where they are constructed, and to access to common infrastructure services such as electricity, water, and sewage. In other words, city planning is not about building architecture; it’s about meta-architecture for designing communities of buildings by focusing on common infrastructure, governance and cohesion. Filtered through a meta-framework prism, the similarity between city planning and SOA is remarkable. Whereas city planning is the meta-architectural framework for building communities, SOA is the meta-architectural framework for collaborative computing.

City planning is a separate profession, distinct from the activities of architect, carpenter, or electrician. In the software development community, carpenters and electricians might correspond to software developers, and architects might correspond to analysts who write specifications for applications. The initial hurdle with this metaphor is that, in most cases, the existing software development community has no de facto analog to the city planner. SOA is destined to resolve this problem by driving into the mainstream a (relatively) new category of IT/business professional, the enterprise architect, whose range of responsibilities is similar to that of a city planner.

Like a city planner, the enterprise architect must have a “big picture” vision that transcends individual units (buildings, services) and focuses instead on the way collections of units (neighborhoods, communities) can fulfill a variety of different purposes. A manufacturing community might consist of a cluster of factories surrounded by homes for workers and connected by railroad links to suppliers of raw materials and component sub-assemblies, as well as to merchants who sell the manufactured products. The community has a need for schools, recreational facilities, police and fire stations, food markets, and so on. Each of these individual facilities could also be used for other purposes. For example, the worker housing could also be used by individuals who do not work at the manufacturing facility, the rail lines could be used to ship goods used for non-manufacturing purposes, and so on. The city planner needs to think about the full constellation of sharable resources that need to be assembled and coordinated.

These observations about city planning illustrate some highly relevant design principles that tomorrow’s enterprise architects should heed when designing specifications for SOA-based IT services. Simply put, enterprise architects must shift their mind-set from today’s stovepipe approach to a connected, virtualized, and federated ecosystem. Unlike the traditional software application architects, the enterprise architects’ role extends well beyond software coding specifications. Instead they must also act as the chief enablers of borderless collaboration by coordinating and prioritizing the input from disparate groups with different needs, interests, and views, including business stakeholders, software architects, developers, and DBAs, as well as external partners, suppliers, providers, customers, auditors, and so on.

One fundamentally important point for enterprise architects is that specifications should be flexible enough to allow for creativity, variability, and initiative in the design and implementation of individual units—whether these units are “bricks and mortar” buildings or individual IT services. However, this heterogeneity must be uniformly constrained by explicit boundaries and formal core tenets for each service in order to achieve the holistic cohesion that enables borderless collaboration and leverages IT asset reuse and the sharing of common infrastructure services.

...

Another important lesson from the city planning metaphor is the co-existence of the old and the new.

...

Managing growth by clustering neighborhoods into communities, communities into cities, and cities into regions is another lesson of city (and regional) planning that has far-reaching applications for enterprise architects designing scalable SOA ecosystems. The fractal-like nature of services allows them to be composed into composite services, which can then be composed into higher-level composite services, and so on. This hierarchy of composite services operates like a nested set of worlds within worlds and makes it possible for each service to retain local autonomy over its own internal operations while also containing complexity and maximizing global interoperability and connectivity through standards-based shared common interfaces. Emerging concepts such as “networks of networks” and “Grids of Grids” exemplify these principles and give new meaning to the old political maxim of “Think globally but act locally.”"

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• Edge Perspectives with John Hagel
  “Diverse perspectives...have a dark side – they lead to the discovery of lots of possible alternatives.” “...generates significant friction. We have come to believe in the business world that friction is bad but, in fact, certain forms of frictio
  (tags: hagel innovation talent_management)

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• GigaOM » Bankruptcy: The Opportunity to Fail
  "it’s not a coincidence that in the world of technology, having some failures under your belt is actually a badge of honor. It means you’ve been around the block — you’ve made mistakes, ones to learn from — experiences that will make you stronge
  (tags: innovation talent_management)
• Kiran Garimella's BPM Blog - ebizQ
  discipline takes discipline. "...discipline need not be boring or bureaucratic...discipline need not add overhead...discipline can increase speed of execution...discipline can become part of corporate culture". makes me think of Agile.
  (tags: kiran_garimella governance soa bpm)

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• Timing, market key to Maine's fund of funds - Mass High Tech: The Journal of New England Technology:
  we need this:"Maine's software and information technology industry association, is putting the finishing touches on a bill that would create a $100 million "fund of funds" to provide venture capital to Maine's burgeoning tech economy."
  (tags: maine economy technology)

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• http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/012307-google-apps.html
  Risky:“Information security, as critical as it is, needs to be taken care of by organizations who live and die by it, who invest the money, time, resources and staff. Why should every company in the world have to build up their own expertise.."
  (tags: security google)
• Heard on the Street - WSJ.com
  Great quote, Bear Sterns Analyst, Andrew Neff re: iphone and blackberry: "Just because Jaguar comes out with a cool Jaguar, it doesn't mean people aren't going to buy trucks," he says.
  (tags: iphone blackberry)
• A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods
  this is great! be sure to mouse over the elements.
  (tags: information_visualization via:kawasaki)
• periodic_table.pdf (application/pdf Object)
  supporting paper for period table of visualization methods
  (tags: information_visualization via:kawasaki)
• Offshore attrition on the rise
  supply and demand: "In other words, if you don't pay enough attention upfront to the realities of attrition at your service provider, you will end up with higher costs, lower-quality deliverables, or, worse, a project that goes bust."
  (tags: offshore)

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• Irving Wladawsky-Berger: A Key Trend for 2007 - and Beyond
  "I believe that highly visual interfaces and virtual worlds will become increasingly important for interacting with applications, communicating with people and engaging in commerce, - what we in IBM have started to call v-business."
  (tags: visualization irvingwb ibm)

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JT posted a challenge on his blog, asking what folks would do if given (an extra) $9 million to invest in your IT shop.  What would you target?  People, Process, Technology?  Jump over there and let him know.

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• Insight and outlook, Part 8: Why and how IBM architects became architects
  13 well known IBM architects share how they came to be architects "Some did so by design. Others stumbled upon their professions after trying other roles." Me, I'm a stumbler
  (tags: architects ibm)
• 'Father Of WebSphere' Defects From IBM To Microsoft - Donald Ferguson, Software - CRN
  lots of speculation, as to what this means for both IBM Websphere and Microsoft. James Governor has a good related post.
  (tags: ibm microsoft architects)
• James Governor’s Monkchips » Don Ferguson Joins Microsoft. 5 things you didn’t know
  james governor's post on don ferguson's IBM defection
  (tags: ibm microsoft architects)

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• WP: Living life at $7.25 an hour - washingtonpost.com Highlights - MSNBC.com
  this is a great article on the realities of living at, and paying, minimum wage.
  (tags: economy)

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• Live from Macworld 2007: Steve Jobs keynote - Engadget
  great pictures of the new iPhone. scroll down to "9:42am". calling it a 'phone' doesn't appear to do it justice.
  (tags: apple iphone)

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• James Governor’s Monkchips » Blog Archive » On Jon Udell, freedom, talent management and the New Patronage economy
  great post by James Governor on the new patronage economy. as anne z says "destined to be a classic"
  (tags: redmonk governor patronage)
• Kiva: Philanthropy 2.0
  'Kiva.org lets you loan money to an entrepreneur in the developing world. On the homepage there is a list of relatively small loan requests (usually $2000 or less), from people in developing countries...Kiva is a Swahili word meaning “agreement” or �
  (tags: philanthropy web2.0 kiva)
• Case Builder For SOA
  hmmm...is the ginsu knife included??? " Service-oriented architecture is one of the toughest initiatives to sell to upper management – but with CASEBUILDER SOA you can do it."
  (tags: soa hype)

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• Customer Intelligence: Event-Processing Alphabet Soup
  this article (IMO) misses the point of ESP and CEP, it's not about delivering data in a "right time manner" to traditional business intelligence and apps, it's about the business opportunities/problems that require real-time response to events...
  (tags: esp cep)

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In the January 2007 issue of BPTrends, David S. Frankel of SAP, points out commonalities in leading IT and business thinking regarding loose coupling, orchestration, and eroding silos.  Besides doing a nice job summarizing leading business thinking, David provides an honest look at the current state of SOA adoption:

The preponderance of IT trade press articles and analyst reports leave the impression that SOA, IT’s key initiative of the decade, is spreading very quickly. However, the reality is somewhat different. Many businesses are holding back on making the large IT investments that SOA requires, and IT spending is not ramping up at a pace that compares with previous IT waves. Big upsurges of IT investment occurred in the past when business people could see that the outlays would enable them to reconstruct their businesses in compelling ways.

(emphasis is mine)

and, offers insights on restarting a business-driven SOA conversation:

...the similarity of this thinking to that of IT thought leaders presents an opportunity for IT to work its way back to the mainstream of the strategic business conversation.

Re-establishing Confidence
This is a situation where some humility could help our IT community. We must acknowledge that we have created our own set of rigid silos, and that we have a lot of work to do to remedy the situation. SOA is simply the IT version of the move to evolve to more flexible organizational forms. But if we claim that IT can make the full transition to SOA quickly, or even that we have solved all the problems inherent in such a transformation, it will not take savvy business executives long to recognize the emptiness of such claims.

In an atmosphere where IT approaches the business with candor, we can start a new conversation. We can point out to business executives that if they want to break down organizational silos, arrange the business as a set of loosely coupled assets, and combine and recombine those assets dynamically, then IT must organize its systems that way as well.

What we can offer the business is a partnership entailing a coordinated, at times wrenching, longterm process of change on both sides of the house. If we manage this partnership well, there are ample gains within reach in the short term, and profound advances in the offing for the long term. IT is going to have to act like a mature business unit in order for such a partnership to work. We must recognize that our part of the transition requires more than just “air dropping” an SOA package into picture. We have to take enterprise architecture extremely seriously; the “top gun” mentality that too often prevails in IT is a characteristic of immaturity.

Conversation Pieces
A successful start to the conversation should allow us to begin drawing more connections beyond the basic correspondence of the two camps’ thinking about silos, loosely coupled assets, and dynamically composing assets.

If you get a chance, read David's article, particularly the section on "What Business Thought Leaders are Saying".  I'd also second David's acknowledgment of Jeff Pendleton in bringing forward the business research and business-IT thinking ties.  I've also had the pleasure of conversing with Jeff on this topic.

Another good (related) resource is Hagel and Brown's The Only Sustainable Edge.

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• BBC NEWS | Technology | $100 laptop project launches 2007
  "In fact, one of the saddest but most common conditions in elementary school computer labs (when they exist in the developing world), is the children are being trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint," Mr Negroponte said.
  (tags: laptop $100)
• Net neutrality push expected to resume in Congress | CNET News.com
  Good write-up on positions and next steps for Net Neutrality.
  (tags: netneutrality)
• Google Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm - New York Times
  color me stunned :) "Unfortunately, most of the academic research suggests that the factors Google has put the most weight on — grades and interviews — are not an especially reliable way of hiring good people."
  (tags: google talent_management)
• 2007: A Year of Big Winnings on Wall Street -- New York Magazine
  Cramer, sans screaming: "But for many corporations and their managements, the stock market is just plain unnecessary, atavistic even. They don’t need the money the market can provide, and they hate the hassle of having a public stock."
  (tags: economy markets)

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