Mike The Architect

2013 Conferences Mike Walker will be Attending

2013-05-09T16:56:34-04:00

For those conference goers out there I wanted to let you all know that I will be at a few US based conferences this year. There may be a few more later in the year but this is what I know for now.

Like many others, I have really enjoyed discussing EA topics, debating the latest trends and frankly, learning from you. Earlier this year I had a great time talking to many of you at the Troux World Conference. That’s the real highlight for me.

If you are attending the event listed below and want to have a meet up please direct message me on Twitter @mikejwalker.

Here are the events I’ll be at for the next few months:

Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit (22 - 23 May, 2013 | National Harbor, MD)
HP Discover (11-13 June, 2013 | Las Vegas, NV)
Open Group Conference (15 – 18 July, 2013 | Philadelphia, PA)

I will be presenting at the Open Group Conference but not at HP Discover (missed the submission window!) and Gartner.

Again, looking forward to seeing you!

The Business Model Canvas: Know Thy Business

2013-05-09T16:24:35-04:00

As Enterprise Architects we drive to maximize value in our companies. With most EA teams residing within an IT area under a CIO we can find ourselves bogged down by the technology weighing down on decisions. The challenge with that is one of context. Without understanding “Why” we are solving a problem will most certainly inhibit the value in which is achieved.

So the question is, do we really know our business before we make architecture decisions? What tools do we use or don’t use to understand the business model?

I was happy to see Alexander Osterwalder publish on the Harvard Business Review blog a post titled, “A Better Way to Think About Your Business Model”. Certainly take a look at this. His post provides some high-level information on why it’s important to use the model. If you find value in the model as I do, you will want to pick up his book, Business Model Generation. Personally I like the hard copy best given it’s so visual. There is also an iPad app that you can get that works really well too. You can find it in the Apple App Store here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/business-model-toolbox/id431605371?mt=8

As I eluded to above, I have found a lot of value in this tool. It is one that I've been using for quite some time now. It’s a brilliant model that helps you dissect what your business is. The data itself isn’t rocket science. It’s the conversation that it triggers which drives the value. I often apply this in workshop like sessions rather than one off data collecting exercises.

WARNING: While it can allude to, the Business Model Canvas does not tell you why your business has been built in the fashion it has. This is within strategy oriented methods and models.

The business model canvas can really help you to understand your business. What is nice about it is that the questions can be applied at multiple levels. You can apply it at a corporate level or apply it to a business unit.

As an example of this, I applied it to an already established enterprise architecture organization. I used the model to assess the organization on its “health”. Asking those business oriented questions forces us to think as if we were a business unit, and that’s not a bad thing. The results were quite amazing because it got the right level of conversation and thinking going to evolve the overall value proposition.

About the Business Model Canvas

If your not familiar with the Business Model Canvas below is a two minute overview of the Business Model Canvas, a tool for visionaries, game changers, and challengers. The business model canvas — as opposed to the traditional, intricate business plan — helps organizations conduct structured, tangible, and strategic conversations around new businesses or existing ones. Leading global companies like GE, P&G, and Nestlé use the canvas to manage strategy or create new growth engines, while start-ups use it in their search for the right business model. The canvas's main objective is to help companies move beyond product-centric thinking and towards business model thinking.

Find out more at http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com

Mike Walker has Joined Hewlett-Packard

2013-04-17T15:37:51-04:00

Some of you may already know from my LinkedIn profile that I have joined Hewlett-Packard (HP) in the Software Division as an Strategy and Enterprise Architecture Advisor.

As I was evaluating HP I didn’t fully appreciate HP’s status in the world of IT. I suppose I just thought of some of the acquisitions and the printer on my desk. It was fascinating to research this historic company and see where they are today.

Below are a few eye opening stats that changed my view and perceptions:

HP is the only high tech company as a fortune 10 company according to Forbes 2012 Fortune 500 list (with companies like Apple 17th, IBM 19th, Microsoft 37th, and Dell 44th)
#1 server vendor in shipments for 10+ consecutive years
#6th largest software company in the world with (#1 distributed systems management software, #1 automated software quality and #1 enterprise search and discovery)
#1 PC market share, including workstations

Once I did my research and joined I decided to take a stop by the historic HP garage where it all started for Silicon Valley or commonly referred to as the "Birthplace of Silicon Valley".

Back to what I’m doing for HP

As most of you may know, I have served in an advisory capacity for some time so the advisor role is a very familiar role for me. When at Microsoft this was a key component to my role. Likewise at HP, I will be an advisor to HP’s top customers. What is interesting about this role is that it isn’t a consulting (billable) type of engagement and there are no quotas that are measured on sales of products or services. This was done very deliberately so that it drove incentives of the enterprise architects to have a business driven and product neutral conversation with customers. HP saw from some high technology vendors with similar offerings that the enterprise architects became more product / solution architects that used the EA vocabulary.

My role as an Enterprise Architecture and Strategy Advisor is broken up into thirds:

Strategy and Enterprise Architecture Advisor – A wide range of activities happen here. From ad-hoc engagements that last a half day to workshops that last multiple days such as strategic discussions, strategy and architecture review, business capability analysis, architecture design session, enterprise blueprinting review or an EA health check.
Enterprise Architecture Community Development – I will continue with blogging, whitepapers, speaking engagements and increased involvement into standards bodies. I will continue to provide thought leadership into the TOGAF standard along with getting plugged into other areas that are impactful to enterprise architects. You may even see a architect community spring up as well.
Provide the Voice of the Customer Back to HP – A very smart move on HP’s part is this aspect to the role in which brings all the insights from the previous two areas back into the HP machine. This could range from simple process improvement to insights into market trends to product challenges.

Well that’s it on that front. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to comment or send me an email.

EA Practitioners Have Significant Influence on $1.1 Trillion in Enterprise IT Spend

2013-04-11T14:45:53-04:00

Gartner just released a report entitled, "EA Practitioners Have Significant Influence on $1.1 Trillion in Enterprise IT Spend” that strongly links to their Business Outcome Driven Enterprise Architecture. This is interesting article because it’s shows the latest thinking from real EA practitioners with some real good stats on where we are at from an industry perspective.

What is also clear is that EA is now positioned to do what we have wanted to do for years, drive business results not just technology decisions. This is a big opportunity for us and it is now our opportunity to lose.

EA Practitioners Have Significant Influence on $1.1 Trillion in Enterprise IT Spend

Fifty percent of enterprise architecture (EA) practitioners have a significant impact on enterprise IT budget activities and decisions, according to a recent survey by Gartner, Inc. A July 2012 Gartner survey of EA practitioners found that half of EA practitioners have an influence over their organization's IT budget allocation that is either "final decision maker" or "great deal of influence."

Based on the EA survey results from Gartner events in North America and Europe, analysts estimate that EA practitioners have a "final decision-making" influence on $331 billion in worldwide enterprise IT spend and a "great deal of influence" on $774 billion in worldwide enterprise IT spending. Overall, EA practitioners have an influence that is either "final decision maker" or "great deal of influence" on $1.1 trillion in worldwide enterprise IT spending.

"Overwhelmingly we find EA practitioners focused on delivering on business value and strategic transformation," said Philip Allega, managing vice president at Gartner. "Gone are the days of just 'doing EA' with little value or impact. Sixty-eight percent of organizations surveyed stated that they are focusing their EA program on aligning business and IT strategies, delivering strategic business and IT value, or enabling major business transformation."

Gartner is leading the way in defining and mastering a radical new approach to EA, which is business outcome-driven EA. Leading EA practitioners are focused on creating diagnostic deliverables to help business and IT leaders respond to business and technology disruptions.

"This new generation of EA practitioners offers technology and service providers (TSPs) with an opportunity as well as a threat," said Mr. Allega. "Technology and service providers should develop targeted marketing to this new generation of EA practitioner as they have a significant influence on their organization buying decisions. Those that fail to understand the priorities, strategic focus and impact of EA practitioners will jeopardize their ability to sell into an organization."

Gartner has identified the impact of EA trends on IT purchasing decisions, and has the following advice and recommendations to help TSPs target this audience more effectively:

In organizations supporting EA as strategic, and as collaborative between business leaders and IT, TSPs will increasingly find EA practitioners influencing IT spend.

EA practitioners have a high degree of influence over emerging technology purchases, with 52 percent of the EA practitioners surveyed reporting directly to a CIO or CTO. They are also "very involved" in integration consulting services (64 percent) and business applications (52 percent). As EA practitioners continue to focus on integrating and aligning with business priorities and actively working with business leaders, their degree of influence on business intelligence tools, workplace tools and business applications will likely increase as well.

Organizations starting, restarting or renewing their EA efforts present an opportunity for providers to market to and influence a new generation of EA practitioners.

The survey revealed that 77 percent of respondents were either restarting or renewing EA efforts (18 percent), initiating EA for the first time (34 percent) or taking EA efforts to the next level (25 percent). In organizations starting EA for the first time, EA practitioners have a significant influence on IT budget decisions, but significantly less have decision-making authority. These new and restarting organizations present an opportunity for TSPs to target a new generation of EA practitioners.

As organizations become more mature in supporting EA, they will have a greater degree of influence on IT budget allocations to products and services.

Many organizations begin their EA journey by focusing inside the IT organization on system consolidation, standardization and cost management. As they mature, this evolves into looking more closely at the "alignment" between the business strategy and IT strategy. From here the EA program evolves further to become "business outcome-oriented," such that in a mature EA program, other areas of decision making are guided and influenced by business outcome-driven EA.

More Information

Additional information is available in the Gartner report, "EA Practitioners Have Significant Influence on $1.1 Trillion in Enterprise IT Spend”. The report is available on Gartner's website at http://www.gartner.com/resId=2286216.

TOGAF Demystification Series: TOGAF Certification is Weak

2013-04-03T11:21:45-04:00

Continuing on with our demystification series, I will talk about the comments I hear form people with regards to the TOGAF certification itself and the process. When I hear comments about this topic they usually gravitate to one end of the extreme to another. I often don't hear a middle ground. This for the obvious reason is an area of extreme passion, and rightfully so. After all we are talking about your career credentials, time investments in learning and the stressful certification process that architects will have to make.

In this post, I will talk about the specific myth that TOGAF certification is weak. I suppose that the term "weak" is a matter of perspective. As we walk through the post we can explore if TOGAF certification is weak and but a bit more qualification around that term.

Overview

With a total of 21,390 certified TOGAF practitioners worldwide, the TOGAF certification has proved to be a market leader in the industry. Combined With all those TOGAF practicing architects and the amount of focus on TOGAF there is bound to be opinions and perceptions around what it takes to become certified along with the level of quality in the process.

Taking a step back, TOGAF certification is based on its extensive experience certifying UNIX implementations. The Open Group believed that the certification process needed to be demonstrably objective—that is, the same results would be achieved, regardless of who executed the process. So, in addition to the publication of the TOGAF framework, The Open Group membership defined a policy for certifying TOGAF products (specifically tools and training), services (consulting), and individuals (practitioners). The requirements for certifying TOGAF tools, training courses, professional services, and individual architects are defined by four TOGAF product standards. TOGAF-certified training courses and TOGAF-certified professional services must be delivered by TOGAF-certified architects.

There are two ways an architect can become TOGAF certified: by taking TOGAF certified training, or by passing a TOGAF-certified examination. The training must address, and the examination will test, knowledge and awareness of TOGAF, and a thorough and complete knowledge of the elements of TOGAF listed in the TOGAF 9.1 Framework specification.

Is the Certification Weak?

Lets look at the areas that I have heard scrutiny on the TOGAF certification:

Achieving the Certification - The process one goes through to get certified. This is the least common concern I hear about but it does come up.
Pass Mark - By far this is the easiest to focus on. The TOGAF pass rate is set at 55% and 60%.
Test Style - I sometimes hear the TOGAF certification as a multiple guess exam.

Achieving the Certification
As I was sitting in on a training session for TOGAF a few months back this topic came up. It's a small misconception but I still wanted to talk about it because I think it's an important point to understand. The point at the training session was, "When do we take the test to become certified". Most people I talk to believe it is simple to get TOGAF certified. The common view (at least with the folks I talk to) is that all you need to do is go to a TOGAF trainer and then take a test at the end of the 4 days.

This simply isn't true. To preserve the integrity of the certification process The Open Group uses a third party called Prometric to administer the defined process. This ensures that there isn't a chance that training providers or other educators alter the process to make it easier (or harder for that matter) for the candidates.

It's subtle but there is an important point here, the TOGAF certification isn't just a certification that you can get by just going to the training and getting the award at the end of the class. There is a lot more to it.

How does the Pass Mark Compare to Other Certifications

The TOGAF Level 2 certification, which most people get is set at a 60% pass rate. I think this is a little low but I think it is acceptable. Lets face it, there is a lot of material to learn inside TOGAF. I'm not convinced that if you raised the pass mark up that it would yield significant better results. I believe that there are other factors at play to increase it's benefits to practitioners .

Let's compare TOGAF to other certifications. Below are industry leading certifications with their pass marks:

ITIL - Multiple choice with a pass mark of 65%
COBIT - 56% pass mark required or 450 right answers out of 800
PMI - A 61% or higher is required to pass

As you can see from the sampling of certifications in other disciplines TOGAF is not that dissimilar from other pass marks. Again, slightly lower but still in the same ball park.

Conclusion

Hopefully what I was able to do was to dispel some of the myths on TOGAF certification along with some hard numbers and comparisons. As I have said a few times in this post, I think the pass mark is on the low side but it's still in the right range and isn't drastically different from the industry.

So, love TOGAF or hate TOGAF it is the market leader in Enterprise Architecture certifications. The number of TOGAF certified praticiners continues to increase year after year and we see continued support from organizations world wide that recognize that as the defacto standard. I see the evidence from two primary areas:

From you… My peers in the industry. Linkedin forums and other social media platforms have given you an open microphone to voice your opinion. This Linkedin thread is just one example: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/What-is-best-certification-should-36248.S.102102747
The market… I have personally seen numbers as high as 60% of EA specific RFP's / RFI's that either require or prefer TOGAF expertise for EA specific work to be done. A post that I wrote two years ago called, "Enterprise Architecture Certifications Distilled" goes through number two years ago (which are staggering alone).

Dave Hornford Addresses Misconceptions Surrounding TOGAF

2013-03-28T16:02:36-04:00

I have gotten a surprising (or maybe not so surprising) discussion on the TOGAF Demystification Series. In one of the posts entitled, "TOGAF Demystification Series: TOGAF Sucks, Incomplete And Overly Complex" there were many comments made about this one in particular. All of the comments made for an interesting conversation but I did like the thoroughness of one in particular. I thought Dave Hornford made some extremely salient points and provided a bit of context from the perspective of the Chair of the TOGAF standard.

Since these great responses were buried in a comment thread I decided that it would be beneficial to all of you to promote this to a post as well given the meaningful content.

Note: For extended context click on the link above to see the full context of the responses. I have left comments unedited.

Dave Hornford Addresses Misconceptions Surrounding TOGAF

Dave Hornford is a Managing Partner for Conexiam as well as the Chair for the Open Group Architecture Forum (TOGAF)

Addressing comments about the quality of TOGAF

Is it as good as I want it to be, not a chance. Can I change it? Of course, all I have to do is obtain a consensus of a project team. The Architecture Forum then reviews this consensus, and then the member companies of the Open Group review it. At every point comments, concerns, objections & improvements must be addressed by consensus. I live Mike's challenge.

In response to a misunderstanding of how TOGAF is applied and the meaning behind Requirements Phase in TOGAF

I do not understand the charge that TOGAF fails because it focuses on requirements? All I can assume is that special meaning is carried into TOGAF. Wherever possible in TOGAF we try to use a concept that can carry a range of specific detail - requirements is one of my favorite examples. TOGAF defines requirement as "a statement of need that must be met by a particular architecture or work package".

TOGAF's requirements are a nice broad concept - a statement of need that must be met by the architecture. What else an I going to find in the strategy, goals, objectives, hopes, fears, dreams, courses of action, and constraints other than requirements? The set of needs that must be met by the architecture.

Further, no weaseling in TOGAF. If we follow the thread in requirements & stakeholders, TOGAF highlights that best practice is provide a name. No hiding behind vague assertions like ‘shareholder value’, or ‘the strategy’. Instead we take those requirements and trace them back to a stakeholder. Show me who wants something and then I can perform trade-off between that stakeholder's requirements and the requirements of the other stakeholders. I can weigh, assess, rank, and refine. And following best practice: review with my stakeholders and use the governance process to provide assurance. My only escape from this tyranny is to get one-or-more stakeholder's to change the requirement, at which point I have a different set that must be met. No wonder TOGAF talks about iteration.

Doing real architecture is hard because of this point - it must address the complete set of requirements. No hiding. Get out in the open and show your work. Describe a target that best addresses the complete set of requirements and deliver a roadmap that will move the organization from where it is to where it wants to be within the capability of the organization to change. (Phase A, B, C, D, E & Requirements Management)

Second, I cannot see how TOGAF's ADM can be considered a solution approach. If I'm doing solution architecture why would I develop an Architecture Vision (Phase A), develop a Roadmap (Phase E) then integrate the Implementation & Migration Plan into the organization's portfolio (Phase F) and manage the lifecycle of my architecture (Phase H). I've heard many ways people wrap a solution approach, complete with proof-of-concept and RFPs into the ADM. But, in my opinion it’s a stretch.

Dave's usage of TOGAF in his engagements

Do TOGAF or do EA? Sorry I don't do TOGAF. I get paid to either deliver useful architecture or improve the capability of an EA team. TOGAF is a tool, not a goal. It is an EA Framework that provides scaffolding for capability, content & method. To quote TOGAF Part I, "the purpose of enterprise architecture is to optimize across the enterprise the often fragmented legacy of processes (both manual and automated) into an integrated environment that is responsive to change and supportive of the delivery of the business strategy"

In my opinion, too many words. In essence darned good - optimize across the enterprise the activity of the enterprise to create an integrated environment that is agile and supports current strategy... That's worth getting out of bed for.

Addressing TOGAF and ArchiMate linkages

Lastly, you contend TOGAF fails because it isn't hand-in-glove with Archimate. Here, I may run into trouble at the next set of member meetings. Archimate is a subset of the concepts required to completely describe an enterprise architecture.

This is not a slur on Archimate, by being a subset it allows me to use a reasonable set of entities, perform traceability between the entities and have a graphical notation I can learn quickly. Beautiful. Truly beautiful.

But, if I need to describe organizational culture, fully map strategy, associate capital allocation, participation of multiple third parties, return on equity and taxation, identify information entities by provenance & usage restriction, clouds and account for last mile connectivity to a specific restricted platform - I may find Archimate limited. When I pull out the complete set of modeling techniques to describe these entities I may have the richness of a 1/2 dozen domain specific modeling techniques and have to perform acrobatics to link them. There never is a free lunch. Don’t forget, I enjoy aerobatics.

When I do EA I need the freedom to describe what I need to describe to address the problem at hand - I will never let the toolset be constrained to a general-purpose saw. Sometimes a spoke shave, or coping saw or Mintzburg's Organigraphs are needed. By the same token, I am very glad that I have a general-purpose tool that works reasonably well most of the time.

TOGAF aligns to my need for freedom and my expectation for a comprehensive toolset - there is a reasonable content-meta-model that provides a reasonable set of entities. I can read the mapping papers to Archimate. Or, I can roll my own and use Mintzburgh's Organigraphic, Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas & the OMG's Business Motivation Model: exquisite richness and an integration challenge. Clearly a job for daveML. Or, use Archimate, and have a reasonable set that provides pre-defined end-to-end traceability. TOGAF is clear, use the tool needed. Describe what is necessary to understand, create a target that meets the set of stakeholder requirements, create a roadmap to traverse the gap and govern the builders to keep them on the path of goodness.

Regardless of my tooling, if I have the elements of TOGAF calls for – governance, appropriate team, integration with corporate process, consistent method to develop an architecture & roadmap, stakeholders and requirements I have the underpinning to create a very good understanding of how the enterprise 'works'. Then I can do my job and optimize the future against the complete set of requirements. Good thing TOGAF is general purpose and provides a scaffold so I can address the problem I have in a manner consistent with the guy in the next office. When we use a minimum set of consistent entities we can even use each other’s work – although the guy in the next office does look askance at Organigraphics and Goal Structuring Notation.

I’d be happier if TOGAF was crisp on the distinction between concept and instantiation. Today I sometimes read an instantiation and have to derive the concept so I can re-instantiate appropriate to my problem. Perhaps the next release will make me happier.

Call to Action

I'll re-iterate Mike's challenge. Want to make the EA world better, join us in the Architecture Forum. But, be prepared to work to consensus with many of the world's leading practitioners. It’s a tough crowd. Specialist boutique consultants, global consulting practices and some of the most advanced in-house architects will review your work. You will be challenged to find what consistently works for a very broad set of problems. Not just mine, or yours, or Mike’s.

You can find out more about Dave Hornford at:

@davehornford
http://www.conexiam.com

EA Effectiveness Series: Highly Impactful EA Organizations Make Value Driven Decisions

2013-03-27T23:35:54-04:00

A big thank you to all the folks that came to my presentation at the Troux World Conference last week. We had a full room of enterprise architects and EA consultants. Thank you for all your support and great questions.

I wanted to share with all of you my presentation given at the conference. Just like with most of my presentations there are lots of images that require a voice over. So, my apologies to those who are seeing this for the first time without hearing it in person. To remedy that a bit, I will post about the concepts form within the presentation over the course of the next few weeks .

Highly impactful ea organizations make value driven decisions from Mike Walker

Summary

Enterprise Architects are faced with a rapidly changing business climate, competitive pressures and a shifting technology landscape that is forcing the enterprise to evolve. With this acceleration of change in the market it requires faster decisions that are well informed to maximize value. Enterprise Architects are at the tip of the spear to enable this change but need the tools.

In this session I will explore one of the proven practices that I have found from highly impactful Enterprise Architecture (EA) organizations, namely enterprise portfolios. Enterprise portfolios extend past the traditional project and program discipline to cover all aspects of the enterprise. Moving from disconnected, static and context-less pieces of data to a governed portfolio of enterprise knowledge that can maximize value and mitigate risk to our businesses.

Come See Mike Walker Speak on the EA Industry Expert Panel and Present at the Troux Conference 2013

2013-03-03T21:34:15-05:00

The Troux Worldwide Conference is returning to Austin, Texas on March 19-20, 2013. If you are a Troux customer, partner, or actively involved in Enterprise Architecture (EA) or Enterprise Portfolio Management (EPM), this is your opportunity to enjoy peer networking and joint learning with a focus on delivering rapid results with Troux EPM solutions.

I'm flattered and feel very fortunate to be invited back to speak on the EA Industry Expert Panel for a third year in a row! This is certainly an honor and I thank Troux for the opportunity to be invited back to this exclusive event each year. I especially am humbled to be surrounded by a great line up of speakers and EA practitioners.

It should be a great event!

If there are folks that are the conference or in the Austin area that want to meet up to discuss EA please let me know either through the comments on this post or through Twitter.

You can see me in two sessions:

Presentation - Highly Impactful EA Organizations Make Value Driven Decisions
EA Industry Expert Panel - Success in the Connected Enterprise

Below I have provided the descriptions of each:

Highly Impactful EA Organizations Make Value Driven Decisions
Enterprise Architects are faced with a rapidly changing business climate, competitive pressures and a shifting technology landscape that is forcing the enterprise to evolve. With this acceleration of change in the market it requires faster decisions that are well informed to maximize value. Enterprise Architects are at the tip of the spear to enable this change but need the tools.

Success in the Connected Enterprise

Success in the connected enterprise requires that executives understand the cause-effect relationships that exist across their organization. They must know what can and should change, when to change it, and where to take risks, all while avoiding unintended consequences. Transforming people, product and processes is difficult, but it is even harder without having access to detailed and reliable knowledge about how the parts of their organizations fit together, operate and evolve. In this session our panelists will share their personal insights, and answer your questions, on how they use various portfolio concepts to navigate and guide critical decision-making in their organizations

EA Panel on Big Data and Cloud Trends Enabled by ArchiMate and TOGAF

2013-03-01T20:51:00-05:00

I had had the pleasure of being on a panel of Enterprise Architecture (EA) experts at The Open Group Conference in Newport Beach, California. We were assembled to discuss complex trends such as big data, Cloud Computing, security, and overall IT transformation and how it can be enabled by The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF®) and the ArchiMate® modeling language.

The panel consisted of Chris Forde, General Manager for Asia-Pacific and Vice President of Enterprise Architecture at The Open Group; Iver Band, Vice Chair of The Open Group ArchiMate Forum and Enterprise Architect at The Standard, a diversified financial services company; Mike Walker, Senior Enterprise Architecture Adviser and Strategist at HP and former Director of Enterprise Architecture at Dell; Henry Franken, the Chairman of The Open Group ArchiMate Forum and Managing Director at BIZZdesign, and Dave Hornford, Chairman of the Architecture Forum at The Open Group and Managing Partner at Conexiam. I served as the

A big thanks to our moderator Dana Gardner from Interarbor Solutions.

See below for the key excerpts:

Complexity from Big Data and Cloud Trends Makes Architecture Tools like ArchiMate and TOGAF More Powerful, Says Expert Panel

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read on the Open Group Blog, full transcript or download a copy.

Gardner: Is there something about the role of the enterprise architect that is shifting?

Walker: There is less of a focus on the traditional things we come to think of EA such as standards, governance and policies, but rather into emerging areas such as the soft skills, Business Architecture, and strategy.

To this end I see a lot in the realm of working directly with the executive chain to understand the key value drivers for the company and rationalize where they want to go with their business. So we’re moving into a business-transformation role in this practice.

At the same time, we’ve got to be mindful of the disruptive external technology forces coming in as well. EA can’t just divorce from the other aspects of architecture as well. So the role that enterprise architects play becomes more and more important and elevated in the organization.

Two examples of this disruptive technology that are being focused on at the conference are Big Data and Cloud Computing. Both are providing impacts to our businesses not because of some new business idea but because technology is available to enhance or provide new capabilities to our business. The EA’s still do have to understand these new technology innovations and determine how they will apply to the business.

We need to get really good enterprise architects, it’s difficult to find good ones. There is a shortage right now especially given that a lot of focus is being put on the EA department to really deliver sound architectures.

Not standalone

Gardner: We’ve been talking a lot here about Big Data, but usually that’s not just a standalone topic. It’s Big Data and Cloud, Cloud, mobile and security.

So with these overlapping and complex relationships among multiple trends, why is EA and things like the TOGAF framework and the ArchiMate modeling language especially useful?

Band: One of the things that has been clear for a while now is that people outside of IT don’t necessarily have to go through the technology function to avail themselves of these technologies any more. Whether they ever had to is really a question as well.

One of things that EA is doing, and especially in the practice that I work in, is using approaches like the ArchiMate modeling language to effect clear communication between the business, IT, partners and other stakeholders. That’s what I do in my daily work, overseeing our major systems modernization efforts. I work with major partners, some of which are offshore.

I’m increasingly called upon to make sure that we have clear processes for making decisions and clear ways of visualizing the different choices in front of us. We can’t always unilaterally dictate the choice, but we can make the conversation clearer by using frameworks like the TOGAF standard and the ArchiMate modeling language, which I use virtually every day in my work.

Hornford: The fundamental benefit of these tools is the organization realizing its capability and strategy. I just came from a session where a fellow quoted a Harvard study, which said that around a third of executives thought their company was good at executing on its strategy. He highlighted that this means that two-thirds are not good at executing on their strategy.

If you’re not good at executing on your strategy and you’ve got Big Data, mobile, consumerization of IT and Cloud, where are you going? What’s the correct approach? How does this fit into what you were trying to accomplish as an enterprise?

An enterprise architect that is doing their job is bringing together the strategy, goals and objectives of the organization. Also, its capabilities with the techniques that are available, whether it’s offshoring, onshoring, Cloud, or Big Data, so that the organization is able to move forward to where it needs to be, as opposed to where it’s going to randomly walk to.

Forde: One of the things that has come out in several of the presentations is this kind of capability-based planning, a technique in EA to get their arms around this thing from a business-driver perspective. Just to polish what Dave said a little bit, it’s connecting all of those things. We see enterprises talking about a capability-based view of things on that basis.

Gardner: Let’s get a quick update. The TOGAF framework, where are we and what have been the highlights from this particular event?

Minor upgrade

Hornford: In the last year, we’ve published a minor upgrade for TOGAF version 9.1 which was based upon cleaning up consistency in the language in the TOGAF documentation. What we’re working on right now is a significant new release, the next release of the TOGAF standard, which is dividing the TOGAF documentation to make it more consumable, more consistent and more useful for someone.

Today, the TOGAF standard has guidance on how to do something mixed into the framework of what you should be doing. We’re peeling those apart. So with that peeled apart, we won’t have guidance that is tied to classic application architecture in a world of Cloud.

What we find when we have done work with the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) for banking architecture, Sherwood Applied Business Security Architecture (SABSA) for security architecture, and the TeleManagement Forum, is that the concepts in the TOGAF framework work across industries and across trends. We need to move the guidance into a place so that we can be far nimbler on how to tie Cloud with my current strategy, how to tie consumerization of IT with on-shoring?

Franken: The ArchiMate modeling language turned two last year, and the ArchiMate 1.0 standard is the language to model out the core of your EA. The ArchiMate 2.0 standard added two specifics to it to make it better aligned also to the process of EA.

According to the TOGAF standard, this is being able to model out the motivation, why you’re doing EA, stakeholders and the goals that drive us. The second extension to the ArchiMate standard is being able to model out its planning and migration.

So with the core EA and these two extensions, together with the TOGAF standard process working, you have a good basis on getting EA to work in your organization.

Gardner: Mike, fill us in on some of your thoughts about the role of information architecture vis-à-vis the larger business architect and enterprise architect roles.

Walker: Information architecture is an interesting topic in that it hasn’t been getting a whole lot of attention until recently.

Information architecture is an aspect of Enterprise Architecture that enables an information strategy or business solution through the definition of the company’s business information assets, their sources, structure, classification and associations that will prescribe the required application architecture and technical capabilities.

Information architecture is the bridge between the Business Architecture world and the application and technology architecture activities.

The reason I say that is because information architecture is a business-driven discipline that details the information strategy of the company. As we know, and from what we’ve heard at the conference keynotes like in the case of NASA, Big Data, and security presentations, the preservation and classification of that information is vital to understanding what your architecture should be.

Least matured

From an industry perspective, this is one of the least matured, as far as being incorporated into a formal discipline. The TOGAF standard actually has a phase dedicated to it in data architecture. Again, there are still lots of opportunities to grow and incorporate additional methods, models and tools by the enterprise information management discipline.

Enterprise information management not only it captures traditional topic areas like master data management (MDM), metadata and unstructured types of information architecture but also focusing on the information governance, and the architecture patterns and styles implemented in MDM, Big Data, etc. There is a great deal of opportunity there.

From the role of information architects, I’m seeing more and more traction in the industry as a whole. I’ve dealt with an entire group that’s focused on information architecture and building up an enterprise information management practice, so that we can take our top line business strategies and understand what architectures we need to put there.

This is a critical enabler for global companies, because oftentimes they’re restricted by regulation, typically handled at a government or regional area. This means we have to understand that we build our architecture. So it’s not about the application, but rather the data that it processes, moves, or transforms.

Gardner: Up until not too long ago, the conventional thinking was that applications generate data. Then you treat the data in some way so that it can be used, perhaps by other applications, but that the data was secondary to the application.

But there’s some shift in that thinking now more toward the idea that the data is the application and that new applications are designed to actually expand on the data’s value and deliver it out to mobile tiers perhaps. Does that follow in your thinking that the data is actually more prominent as a resource perhaps on par with applications?

Walker: You’re spot on, Dana. Before the commoditization of these technologies that resided on premises, we could get away with starting at the application layer and work our way back because we had access to the source code or hardware behind our firewalls. We could throw servers out, and we used to put the firewalls in front of the data to solve the problem with infrastructure. So we didn’t have to treat information as a first-class citizen. Times have changed, though.

Information access and processing is now democratized and it’s being pushed as the first point of presentment. A lot of times this is on a mobile device and even then it’s not the corporate’s mobile device, but your personal device. So how do you handle that data?

It’s the same way with Cloud, and I’ll give you a great example of this. I was working as an adviser for a company, and they were looking at their Cloud strategy. They had made a big bet on one of the big infrastructures and Cloud-service providers. They looked first at what the features and functions that that Cloud provider could provide, and not necessarily the information requirements. There were two major issues that they ran into, and that was essentially a showstopper. They had to pull off that infrastructure.

The first one was that in that specific Cloud provider’s terms of service around intellectual property (IP) ownership. Essentially, that company was forced to cut off their IP rights.

Big business

As you know, IP is a big business these days, and so that was a showstopper. It actually broke the core regulatory laws around being able to discover information.

So focusing on the applications to make sure it meets your functional needs is important. However, we should take a step back and look at the information first and make sure that for the people in your organization who can’t say no, their requirements are satisfied.

Gardner: Data architecture is it different from EA and Business Architecture, or is it a subset? What’s the relationship, Dave?

Hornford: Data architecture is part of an EA. I won’t use the word subset, because a subset starts to imply that it is a distinct thing that you can look at on its own. You cannot look at your Business Architecture without understanding your information architecture. When you think about Big Data, cool. We’ve got this pile of data in the corner. Where did it come from? Can we use it? Do we actually have legitimate rights, as Mike highlighted, to use this information? Are we allowed to mix it and who mixes it?

When we look at how our business is optimized, they normally optimize around work product, what the organization is delivering. That’s very easy. You can see who consumes your work product. With information, you often have no idea who consumes your information. So now we have provenance, we have source and as we move for global companies, we have the trends around consumerization, Cloud and simply tightening cycle time.

Gardner: Of course, the end game for a lot of the practitioners here is to create that feedback loop of a lifecycle approach, rapid information injection and rapid analysis that could be applied. So what are some of the ways that these disciplines and tools can help foster that complete lifecycle?

Band: The disciplines and tools can facilitate the right conversations among different stakeholders. One of the things that we’re doing at The Standard is building cadres equally balanced between people in business and IT.

We’re training them in information management, going through a particular curriculum, and having them study for an information management certification that introduces a lot of these different frameworks and standard concepts.

Creating cadres

We want to create these cadres to be able to solve tough and persistent information management problems that affect all companies in financial services, because information is a shared asset. The purpose of the frameworks is to ensure proper stewardship of that asset across disciplines and across organizations within an enterprise.

Hornford: The core is from the two standards that we have, the ArchiMate standard and the TOGAF standard. The TOGAF standard has, from its early roots, focused on the components of EA and how to build a consistent method of understanding of what I’m trying to accomplish, understanding where I am, and where I need to be to reach my goal.

When we bring in the ArchiMate standard, I have a language, a descriptor, a visual descriptor that allows me to cross all of those domains in a consistent description, so that I can do that traceability. When I pull in this lever or I have this regulatory impact, what does it hit me with, or if I have this constraint, what does it hit me with?

If I don’t do this, if I don’t use the framework of the TOGAF standard, or I don’t use the discipline of formal modeling in the ArchiMate standard, we’re going to do it anecdotally. We’re going to trip. We’re going to fall. We’re going to have a non-ending series of surprises, as Mike highlighted.

“Oh, terms of service. I am violating the regulations. Beautiful. Let’s take that to our executive and tell him right as we are about to go live that we have to stop, because we can’t get where we want to go, because we didn’t think about what it took to get there.” And that’s the core of EA in the frameworks.

Walker: To build on what Dave has just talked about and going back to your first question Dana, the value statement on TOGAF from a business perspective. The businesses value of TOGAF is that they get a repeatable and a predictable process for building out our architectures that properly manage risks and reliably produces value.

The TOGAF framework provides a methodology to ask what problems you’re trying to solve and where you are trying to go with your business opportunities or challenges. That leads to Business Architecture, which is really a rationalization in technical or architectural terms the distillation of the corporate strategy.

From there, what you want to understand is information — how does that translate, what information architecture do we need to put in place? You get into all sorts of things around risk management, etc., and then it goes on from there, until what we were talking about earlier about information architecture.

If the TOGAF standard is applied properly you can achieve the same result every time, That is what interests business stakeholders in my opinion. And the ArchiMate modeling language is great because, as we talked about, it provides very rich visualizations so that people cannot only show a picture, but tie information together. Different from other aspects of architecture, information architecture is less about the boxes and more about the lines.

Quality of the individuals

Forde: Building on what Dave was saying earlier and also what Iver was saying is that while the process and the methodology and the tools are of interest, it’s the discipline and the quality of the individuals doing the work

Iver talked about how the conversation is shifting and the practice is improving to build communications groups that have a discipline to operate around. What I am hearing is implied, but actually I know what specifically occurs, is that we end up with assets that are well described and reusable.

And there is a point at which you reach a critical mass that these assets become an accelerator for decision making. So the ability of the enterprise and the decision makers in the enterprise at the right level to respond is improved, because they have a well disciplined foundation beneath them.

A set of assets that are reasonably well-known at the right level of granularity for them to absorb the information and the conversation is being structured so that the technical people and the business people are in the right room together to talk about the problems.

This is actually a fairly sophisticated set of operations that I am discussing and doesn’t happen overnight, but is definitely one of the things that we see occurring with our members in certain cases.

Hornford: I want to build on that what Chris said. It’s actually the word “asset.” While he was talking, I was thinking about how people have talked about information as an asset. Most of us don’t know what information we have, how it’s collected, where it is, but we know we have got a valuable asset.

I’ll use an analogy. I have a factory some place in the world that makes stuff. Is that an asset? If I know that my factory is able to produce a particular set of goods and it’s hooked into my supply chain here, I’ve got an asset. Before that, I just owned a thing.

I was very encouraged listening to what Iver talked about. We’re building cadres. We’re building out this approach and I have seen this. I’m not using that word, but now I’m stealing that word. It’s how people build effective teams, which is not to take a couple of specialists and put them in an ivory tower, but it’s to provide the method and the discipline of how we converse about it, so that we can have a consistent conversation.

When I tie it with some of the tools from the Architecture Forum and the ArchiMate Forum, I’m able to consistently describe it, so that I now have an asset I can identify, consume and produce value from.

Business context

Forde: And this is very different from data modeling. We are not talking about entity relationship, junk at the technical detail, or third normal form and that kind of stuff. We’re talking about a conversation that’s occurring around the business context of what needs to go on supported by the right level of technical detail when you need to go there in order to clarify.

Open CA Gets Top Pay in Enterprise Architecture Certifications

2013-02-25T11:08:34-05:00

As I was doing some market research for my EA's competency driven strategy I ran across an interesting article from late 2012 that validates the importance of a well educated, fully rounded and even certified Enterprise Architect. The article, "23 IT Certifications That Mean Higher Pay" posted on CIO.com in September of 2012, shows that companies value these skills and are willing to pay more.

The data was pulled from the Foote Research Group quarterly 2012 IT Skills Demand and Pay Trends Report and its CEO David Foote spoke with CIO.com about how you can use certifications to get employers to show you the money.

The article separates the list into three tiers of percent added to base pay from the lowest to highest:

8% - 13% Added to Base
10% - 15% Added to Base
12% - 16% Added to Base

In the highest tier of 12% to 16% Open Group Certified Architect (Open CA) gets top ranking in Enterprise Architecture certifications for largest percent premium added to your base salary. I received my Open CA certification in 2011 and was nominated to the certification board. It was quite the honor for both.

Afterwards I really wanted top share my experiences and write up a condensed version of what Open CA really was. You can find this information in the post entitled, "The Open Group Certified Architect (Open CA) Program Distilled".

Two things I think this article says about our industry:

Baseline of Skills and Competencies - Whether it is Open CA or any other EA certification, I believe this shows a natural maturing in the EA discipline. The industry is bringing together a set of common and recognized set of skills and competencies through these certifications. In this case the EA market has recoginized Open CA as the most popular and perhaps the defacto standard for EA skills and competencies.
Competencies of Skills - I liked seeing Open CA certification on this list rather than TOGAF or a Zachman certification (there are many others besides these two). The reason I prefer Open CA is because it is competency based. Meaning it's about how and what you have done as a practitioner and not about what you know from reading a book or taking a class.

For more information on Open CA: http://www.opengroup.org/openca/cert/

Also of note in that tier with Open CA is the Program Management Professional (PgMP) certification.