You don’t have to impress executives with a list of three-letter acronyms related to enterprise design and management. You can distill the role of the enterprise architect into relatable terms, such as:

‘The enterprise architecture affects the entirety of any business. It’s not just about IT but derived from the business vision. Enterprise architecture is the development of business and technology strategies that align IT activities with business goals. Enterprise architects convert the business strategy into an actionable plan, translating that plan for execution by the technologists and ensuring that everything aligns with the business goals and delivers the projected outcomes.’

For enterprise architects to have an impact on business success, they must demonstrate business value and show how the enterprise plays a strategic role. Architects also must speak the same language as the rest of the executive team.

Claiming a Role at the Boardroom Table

To claim a place in boardroom discussions, the enterprise architect needs to demonstrate value using clear and easily understood terms. They should be passionate but also careful in how they evangelize the role of IT. Gaining a seat at the table will require laying some groundwork and patience, but there will be significant benefits for all concerned.

Here are four strategies to ensure the enterprise architect claims a more strategic business role:

1) Speak in relatable terms. Part of the architect’s job is to demystify enterprise systems. Technology can be difficult to understand for those who don’t live and breathe IT, so avoid techspeak and simplify your terminology. A fruitful dialogue can only take place when participants use a common language. You also will need to adapt your message since different stakeholders are looking for different messages. For example, to get the marketing department’s attention, you want to speak about benefits such as faster time-to-market. The head of IT will respond to discussions relating to product updates and managing the lifecycle of IT components. Executive management wants to hear about lowering costs, reducing risk, and increasing business agility. Build strategic relationships by joining managers and executives in department meetings and informal settings. Your mission is to spread the word about the value of enterprise architecture throughout the organization.

2) Serve as a collaborator and consultant: Develop an understanding of the organization’s landscape, processes, and vision so you can serve as an enterprise consultant. Collaborate with stakeholders and look for ways to integrate systems. Help departments, teams, and individuals solve real problems. Assist the CIO with advice about applications and licenses in the enterprise portfolio. Work with security teams, providing updated applications overviews, and showing them how to handle critical customer and employee data. You will gain allies by providing the necessary data and insights for different departments and functions, making it easier to get buy-in for new enterprise initiatives.

3) Supply data for critical decision-making. Data is enterprise currency and should be shared as part of executive management discussions to aid data-driven decisions. A knowledgeable enterprise architect can show board members how to translate the data for business requirements into technical specifications. They can also use data to illustrate solutions to real issues, demonstrating options that deliver concrete results. The architect also can provide reports on IT inventory and the state of the current application landscape to inform board member evaluations and decision-making, including reports to tie the enterprise architecture into business processes.

4) Gain executive sponsors. If you want to be credible in the boardroom, it helps to know the right people. The enterprise architect needs to understand who the business players are, including who has clout, who is open to new ideas, and who makes up different factions. You need sponsorship from executive influencers who can support enterprise architecture initiatives. Executive sponsors can influence factors that directly impact enterprise strategies, such as budgets, vendor selections, and technology acquisitions. It pays to be prepared to engage key executives in meaningful conversations and build rapport so they will remember you as an ally and knowledgeable consultant.

The Enterprise Architect’s Expanding Role

With increased emphasis on digitization and digital transformation, the role of the enterprise architect has become even more essential to business success. The enterprise architect is responsible for emerging artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, data, and analytics that impact every aspect of operations. The enterprise should be viewed as a holistic framework that touches every department, policy, and process. To oversee the enterprise, the architect must provide technical expertise and consultative capabilities tempered by market sector knowledge.

The enterprise architect is also responsible for moving the organization away from operational silos and assessing the impact of end-to-end processes and horizontal integration. The enterprise architect provides insight and data to determine what applications need to be retired, migrated, or changed based on business objectives, providing leadership with insight about initiatives being on track.

Many organizations still don’t invite enterprise architects to participate in board meetings, largely because they don’t speak the same language, share the same knowledge base, or understand the value of the data and collaborative relationship. With the right preparation and networking with key stakeholders, an enterprise architect can make a strong case for a permanent seat at the boardroom table. They must demonstrate how they contribute to productivity, revenue growth, cost reduction, and agility to make the organization more competitive and profitable.

The post Time for enterprise architects to take their place in the boardroom appeared first on SD Times.

First, can you introduce yourselves and your teams?

BECKIE RISS (Principal Architect, Developer Relations, Tools & Enablement): My team is part of Enterprise Architecture, and builds internal platforms, tools, and processes to support cloud-native software development across Ford.  

SATISH PURANAM (Technical Leader, Cloud): My team is a part of Ford’s IT Operations, where we specialize in public and private cloud technologies, which includes a lot of Research & Development, product evaluation, services inception, and are always on call to solve any major service disruption across our portfolio.

Why should software experts consider Ford?

RISS: We have committed to a comprehensive, company-wide digital transformation, have our best product lineup ever (including #2 in EV sales to Tesla) and are making it even more enjoyable to own a Ford vehicle with software-led always-on technologies, services and experiences. For example, we learn customer preferences from connected vehicle data and then can add new features or make other improvements by shipping software over-the-air to those products. Just consider F-150 and Mustang Mach-E customers who recently received Ford Power-Up software updates with our BlueCruise hands-free, eyes-on-the-road highway driving technology. One day, they were driving their vehicles normally but the next day they could go hands-free. To support all of this, we are making it easier for software experts to focus on the best parts of the jobs while removing many of the obstacles that before prevented them from being more creative and productive.

How did Ford get started on this technical transformation?

RISS: In 2016, Marcy Klevorn, Ford Smart Mobility CIO, kicked off an initiative to begin Ford Motor Company’s cloud native application development journey to harness the full power of modern cloud computing technologies and infrastructure. As part of this initiative, the Cloud & DevOps Growth and Maturation (CDGM) team was formed under the Enterprise Architecture Leadership to accelerate the development of cloud native applications and upskill many Software Engineers. Ford’s journey to modernize application hosting environment, to support software development, was driven by a desire to reduce lead time to market and keep our cost and complexity in check for the development community and infrastructure site reliability engineers.

PURANAM: We have shifted our digital strategy over that time as new technologies have become more mainstream and believe that will continue as there is no end in sight for the innovations that may become reality in the future. Our main challenges are around end-user enablement and reducing the huge barrier to entry to these modern technology stacks.

What does success look like for you?

PURANAM: Our software engineers can quickly deliver business capabilities with a high level of satisfaction and effectiveness.

RISS: The team goal is to allow freedom of choice to Software Engineers to pick and choose technology and toolsets that innovate and provide an “opinionated stack”.

What tools and technologies are you adopting?

PURANAM: Our focus areas include public cloud, and open technologies like Kubernetes, Knative, Istio, Tekton, ArgoCD, Kubevirt, Prometheus, SigStore, and Terraform. Also, data platforms like Airflow, Kubeflow, Seldon to name a few.

RISS: The team is currently working on a software platform using Backstage to consolidate and make the various portals, services, guides, tools, and infrastructure onboarding utilities seamless for Software Engineers.

Part of your work is “cultural transformation”. What parts of Ford’s development culture need to evolve as part of adopting new technology?

PURANAM: We recognized early on we needed to redefine the roles we valued, educate our workforce to fill those roles, and organize differently to be nimbler. First, IT leadership team defined the key culture values: “be curious”, “do the right thing”, and “create tomorrow”. 

RISS: Our people started to recognize they needed to own their own professional development. Our CIO created PowerUp Time, which is four hours per week where employees could spend time upskilling or working on an innovative project to transform the tools and platforms we used. We also recognized it made sense to have a central team to work out the kinks of putting dev tools together and make those platforms available for software engineers, rather than having people repeat integration work.

What have been the most difficult changes around Cloud Native and Open Source for your staff?

RISS: Self-service.  The cloud native platform puts you, the developer, behind the wheel. That realization has been a mixed bag; some people are excited to be in control, while others are terrified. Hence, we need to build platforms/services that provide an easy on-ramp with adequate guard-rails built-in. Advocacy became hugely important.  So much of our work is getting started guides, videos, FAQs, and 1-on-1s.

PURANAM: Lack of an easy on-ramp and rapid pace of change, so developers need to be always on their toes. Reducing cognitive load for our developers is hard.

Did KubeByExample.com help with adopting these changes?

PURANAM: We created a reference application based on the KubeByExample tutorials that helps our people learn Kubernetes and Tekton.  Everything that the site talks about is something that our developers need to learn.

Speaking of Tekton, how did your team come to adopt it?  Were they already familiar with Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)?

RISS: When we started our journey in 2016, the organization started to adopt using CI/CD pipelines, mainly using Jenkins. The culture change of moving to CI/CD was slow and relied on where we wanted to invest on modernizing our legacy, but quick as we developed greenfield applications. Tekton didn’t come on our horizon until we got a supporting partner. So, the teams went from adopting CI/CD to adopting Tekton in the last 18 months.

PURANAM: Tekton is Kubernetes-native, and we wanted that to leverage our growing expertise. We were looking for reusable components with loose coupling — to create individual tasks and let developers re-use those tasks.  Tekton has let us abstract a lot of concepts away, so that teams don’t need to be experts in CI/CD to use it.  We had Terraform to do provisioning, and Tekton gave us a parallel way to drive other infrastructure changes.

RISS: We have been working on adopting best practices recommended by DORA, which advocates Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), CI/CD to drive frequent and small releases that go through proper functional and security testing. We believe this approach and practices are essential to succeed.

What about adopting Knative and serverless platforms?

PURANAM: Knative is an abstraction layer to remove the complexities of Kubernetes. Do developers need to have expertise in 1000s of Kubernetes objects?  Or do they have some code and don’t need to care about infrastructure?  It’s all about how we reduce the cognitive load on developers.

RISS: It lets our team abstract away all the complexities around building and deploying containers for the Angular, Java Spring Boot, and Node.js Technology stacks.

Any final thoughts about Ford and the future of Cloud Native?

RISS: I have seen so many technological advancements over my career it is hard to anticipate the future.   I can say with confidence that we will adopt new technologies as they emerge and leverage them to the benefit of software development for the company.  

To hear more about cloud native topics, join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the cloud native community at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022 in Detroit (and virtual) from October 24-28.

The post Ford’s Cloud Native Transformation: A Q&A appeared first on SD Times.

“Despite best efforts, many EA programs fall from “best practices” to “worst practices.” Enterprise architecture and technology innovation leaders must be vigilant and navigate away from practices that sink EA efforts.” Gartner wrote in a post. 

The top 13 worst EA practices a organization can make are:

1. Not linking business strategy and targeted business outcomes
2. Confusing technical architecture with Enterprise Architecture
3. Focussing on the current-state architecture first
4. Excessive governance and overbearing assurance
5. Creating a standard for everything
6. Being engrossed in the art and language of EA instead of business outcomes
7. Strict adherence to EA frameworks and industry reference models
8. Adopting an “ivory tower” approach to EA
9. Lack of continuous communication and feedback
10. Restricting the EA team to IT resources only
11. Lack of key performance metrics
12. Purchasing an EA tool before understand the use cases and critical capabilities
13. Thinking that EA is ever done

Saul Brand, senior director analyst at Gartner, points out if businesses look at the Gartner’s top 8 best practices to being successful at EA, governance and assurance doesn’t happen until step six. Thinking of EA as a form of guardrails is a “worst practice” because it makes EA a command and control practice when it should be more of a “center of higher knowledge and knowledge sharing.”

Another worst EA practice to point out is when organizations run out and buy a tool first. “There’s an old saying: ‘a fool with a tool is still a fool,’” said Brand. Clients who run out and buy a tool first become obsessed with integrating and implementing it. “They forget the real purpose of enterprise architecture is that value proposition.”

The post Gartner’s 13 worst EA practices appeared first on SD Times.

According to Saul Brand, senior director analyst at Gartner, research shows 76% of clients are either starting, restarting or renewing their EA practices. “What we mean by renewing [refers to] clients who are doing some form of enterprise architecture. They are most typically doing solutions and technical architecture, and doing a foundational traditional approach to EA. What is happening is that is not enough,” he said. 

The ongoing need to digitally transform and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic is bringing new meaning to why and how businesses do enterprise architecture.

“Enterprise architecture is the process of capturing enough of your organization’s information systems, IT infrastructure, application portfolio, and workforce in a way to identify meaningful  and progressive changes to the enterprise,” said Tom O’Reilly, chief operations officer for Sparx Systems, an EA company. 

Why is EA becoming important again? 
In just the last couple years, organizations have been going through a number of different transformations such as cloud transformations, the shift to microservice architecture, the removal of outdated technology, and the introduction of new systems, André Christ, CEO and co-founder of LeanIX, an EA and cloud governance company.

Because enterprise architecture enables a business to map out all their systems and processes and how they connect together, EA is becoming a “very important method and tool to drive forward digital transformation,” said Christ. He explained that since most transformations don’t start off as greenfield projects, about 70% of them fail due to their existing IT landscape. Having a solid baseline, which EA aims to provide, is crucial for any transformation initiative. 

“The reason for this is that once you’ve started a transformation program, you discover new dependencies because of applications connected to other systems that you never knew of before. So replacing them with better applications, with newer interfaces, and with better APIs all of a sudden isn’t as easy as you thought when you were starting the transformation program,” he explained. 

Businesses also want to understand where their investments in the IT landscape are going, and connect the business strategic goals to the activities in their transformation program. “This is where enterprise architecture can help you. It allows you to look at this whole hierarchy of objectives and programs you are setting up, the affected applications you are having, and the underlying changes in detail,” said Christ. 

The main benefits organizations are looking to get out of EA are: avoiding redundant systems, reducing the need to pay for additional support costs for those redundant systems, removing the risk of outdated technologies, accelerating the speed in which they can introduce new apps, and the ability to better integrate systems, Christ went on to explain.  

“This is fundamentally what’s going on with many of our clients. The recognition that enterprise architecture is important. The recognition that it is front and center to digitization as we rethink about creating new business models and new business designs,” Gartner’s Brand added. 

Additionally, the rapid changes businesses had to make as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic is making EA a significant practice within the enterprise, according to Martin Owen, vice president of product strategy at data governance company erwin. 

When COVID hit, the majority of businesses hadn’t thought about how they were going to change their business structure, work from home, or adapt their short-term and long-term objectives. Businesses had to make sense of all their processes and systems to change its business continuity planning and ensure they would not have to go through this type of disruption unprepared again. 

But, before they could do anything they needed a blueprint to map everything out and easily understand what changed, when, how, and why. EA became a strategic tool to support, prepare, assist, strategize and implement changes needed to tackle the crisis. Activities like disaster recovery and business continuity planning became easier because EA provided visibility into what current processes, systems, and people the businesses had, and what they are doing, Owen explained. 

However, Gartner sees that businesses have gone back to normal and are now focusing on investing in the IT estate to create a digitized operating model. “The role of EA is really reverting back to what it was pre-COVID, but at an even more accelerated pace. COVID kind of opened the eyes for enterprise architecture’s importance. But now that we’ve overcome the initial impact of COVID, and we are now into this recovery phase, EA elevated itself,” said Brand.

The history and evolution of EA
Gartner has noticed this increased interest and revival of EA since 2013. According to Brand, EA has been around since 1987, but crashed and burned in 2012 because it failed to provide businesses value. “Enterprise architecture became very ‘ivory towerish.’ It focused very much on this idea of doing solutions and technical architecture. It became very engrossed in this idea of command and control, governance, assurance, standards and review boards,” said Brand. “It just generally became very much of a function within IT that even IT struggled to understand.” 

Some of the ways businesses tackled EA in the past was through the Zachman Framework, the Open Group Architectural Framework (TOGAF), and the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF), according to LeanIX’s Christ. The Zachman Framework was released in the 1980s to enable organizations to start meaningful conversations with the information systems team, create business value through architectural representations, evaluate tools and optimize approaches to development. TOGAF enabled businesses to design, implement, guide, and maintain the enterprise through controlled phases, also known as the Architecture Development Method. The FEAF was designed for the U.S. Government to start implementing EA practices within federal agencies. These frameworks had benefits and value, but Brand noticed clients “invariably ran into a problem” because they were not “delivering a business value and these clients had to quickly rethink about restarting their EA practice,” he explained. “Now, the challenge for them is thinking about having to take often a rudimentary or foundational enterprise architecture and having to bring it up to the next level of capability and maturity.”

What is necessary is an operating model that enables EA to design the IT estate and enable future-state capabilities that drive “customer centricity and targeted outcomes,” according to Brand. For that reason, he has seen the purpose of EA change from 2012 to take more of a business-outcome-driven approach and start by linking to business direction and strategy.

The traditional way of doing EA has been through Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM), which is the practice of establishing and maintaining a set of guidelines and principles to govern and direct the design and development of an enterprise’s architecture. This practice is not going anywhere, Brand explained, it’s just moving down the list of EA priorities. “If enterprise architecture is going to be of value, it’s starting point is different,” said Brand. “The emphasis today with modern EA is first by looking at the strategic conceptual contextual things.” With the EAM approach, businesses tend to try to solve the how before they reach the what and why.

Gartner’s eight steps to starting, restarting or renewing a business-outcome-driven EA program are:

1. Adopt business-outcome-driven EA
2. Construct a value proposition
3. Start with business architecture
4. Determine organizational design
5. Determine skill sets and staffing
6. Determine governance and assurance
7. Determine business value metrics
8. Construct a charter

The first three steps establish an approach to EA while the following five execute and operationalize EA. Enterprises first need to understand the technologies, find a practical use case and then operationalize it with the technologies and the existing IT estate. The key concepts driving a modern EA practice is planning, designing, innovating, orchestrating, navigating and operationalizing, according to Brand.

And today, Brand is seeing even more of an evolution with efforts to transform EA into an internal management consultancy. “Our clients are doing business-outcome-driven EA, but they recognize they have to deliver it in a different way, and hence they tend to use the management consultancy model,” said Brand. “What we are talking about is an extension of business-outcome-driven EA, but the catch is how we deliver this to the organization so that value is understood.”

This EA as an internal management consultancy transformation has been an ongoing trend since 2016, and it involves utilizing fusion teams, which is a concept where business and IT lead the use of technology to create new business designs and models. “It’s not the old days where it’s simply business says and IT does. This is a relationship between business and IT people jointly making decisions about investment in their IT estate.”  

The number one challenge for EA since the beginning has always been the inability to make a value proposition for the discipline, according to Brand. “How do you build a value proposition? By using EA internal consultancy,” he said. 

EA beyond 2020 
Last year, Gartner’s enterprise architecture predictions focused on the “importance of information architecture becoming more prevalent” and clients having to think about “stepping up their game.” 

This year, Gartner is seeing the idea of enterprise architecture become more involved and focused on the composable enterprise. “We do see EA becoming more front and center to helping build a composable IT estate that is quicker, better and able to deliver speed to value and time to market.” 

“Composable business is a natural acceleration of the digital business that you live every day. It allows us to deliver the resilience and agility that these interesting times demand,” said Daryl Plummer, distinguished vice president analyst, during the opening keynote at virtual Gartner IT Symposium/Xp 2020 in October. “We’re talking about the intentional use of ‘composability’ in a business context — architecting your business for real-time adaptability and resilience in the face of uncertainty.”

Brand believes EA will continue to evolve, adapt and respond to the changing world. “Remember, we are building digitally technology-enabled and data-driven business models, and enterprise architecture is front and center to delivering all of that. It is the intersection between business and IT,” he said. 

By 2023, Gartner expects 60% of organizations will depend on EA to lead digital innovation. “Today’s enterprise architects are responsible for designing intelligence into the business and operating models, identifying ways to help their organization use data, analytics and artificial intelligence to plan, track and manage digital business investments,” Brand stated. 

Brand also predicts by 2023, EA tools will be more intelligent to support customer experience, product design, machine learning and IoT. He went on to explain that in order for EA leaders to demonstrate business value today they must design for intelligence, refocus on information architecture, lead digital innovation, and leverage intelligent tools. 

However, he recommends organizations decide what they want to get out of EA first, get buy-in and mandate, ensure the practice is valuable and interesting, then start to think about how a tool can be implemented. 

Spark Systems’ O’Reilly sees tools organizations maturing to a more team-based approach for EA going forward. “It is imperative that EA needs to be contributed to and accessible by each and every member of an organization (with a few EA heads to govern the process),” O’Reilly explained. “Companies may have been able to treat EA as an ivory tower practice pre-COVID, however now that many organizations are taking advantage of their employees working from home…a team-based accessible solution is required.” 

One of the main challenges for EA practices is knowing how much information to capture and the level of detail. “Many organizations agree that they need enterprise architecture and will spend the next 10 years capturing their current system. Unfortunately at that point when they are ‘done’ their model is 10 years out of date. To overcome this there needs to be some conscious decision to decide when enough information has been gathered to make a decision. The easiest way to achieve this is to have every member of your team contribute to the overall picture on a daily basis as part of their work,” O’Reilly explained.

Erwin’s Owen added that being able to automate software discovery, and integrate with data modeling tools will also help EA provide insight into process, people, the organization and the technologies.

“In recent times the main trend has been integration between industry standard tooling providers to be able to share a specific part of the picture, or in enterprise architects case, to be able to combine information from these separate systems to paint a picture as a whole,” said O’Reilly.

The post The resurgence of enterprise architecture appeared first on SD Times.

Adding more intelligence to transportation allows people, goods and vehicles to move faster, safer and more efficiently. Road authorities and industry stakeholders know this and are eager to upgrade their road networks, creating a dynamic high-growth industry.

For several years, Sparx Systems and their Enterprise Architect software has been supporting the development of several families of ITS standards which are widely used. For example, with the aim to support sustainable mobility in the European road sector, the DATEX II family of standards (CEN16157 series) was developed for information exchange between traffic management centers, traffic information centers and service providers and constitutes the reference for applications that have been developed over that period. Enterprise Architect continues to be used as the core tool for technical maintenance of the standards. Enterprise Architect is also used to underpin other standards families including public transport standards and traffic and traveler information standards created in both ISO/TC204 and CEN/TC278.

Ken Harkin, Head of Strategic Relations at Sparx Systems said, “As the ITS sector evolves, our support for the standards development work being undertaken must be capable of supporting changing demand driven by increasing complexity. It must support collaboration.

The Pro Cloud Server supports team based model reviews and discussions and is globally accessible via the WebEA interface from any smart phone, tablet or computer. No longer bound by time, location or device, team productivity is unleashed.”

Maarten Peelen, Committee Manager of CEN/TC 278, said “This support from Sparx Systems is very welcome, as ITS standards development advances. The development of Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) will allow road users and traffic managers to share and use information and coordinate their actions, which is key to significantly improving road safety and traffic efficiency.

C-ITS typically involves communication between vehicles (V2V), between vehicles and infrastructure (V2I) and/or infrastructure -to-infrastructure (I2I). A shared vision is essential to develop standards for complex C-ITS scenarios and in this sense, Sparx Systems technology will prove invaluable to our work.”

Dr Jon Harrod Booth, a ITS standards developer for more than 20 years, commented, ”The kind support Sparx Systems provides has helped several standards Technical Committees develop consistent and coherent UML models across many industry standards; and this strongly helps developer communities. This collaboration with the ITS standards communities provides a great boost to the work we are undertaking.”

The post Sparx Systems supports standards development for Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) appeared first on SD Times.

From its origins as a collaboration-boosting add-on to Sparx Enterprise Architect (EA), Prolaborate is rapidly evolving into an enterprise-level platform for personalized content sharing and integration of multivendor tools like Jira, Confluence, SharePoint and eaDocX.

More and more enterprises are leveraging Prolaborate to collaborate on creating EA models and to share content with wider audiences of business stakeholders and other non-EA users. Prolaborate extends the reach of EA models and maximizes their value by offering capabilities to publish, build dynamic reporting dashboards, and conduct reviews across stakeholders. The platform includes extensive capabilities for customizing dashboards and views.  

In gaining more enterprise customers along the way , Prolaborate has added seamless integration with platforms that include Jira, for user stories and issues tracking;  Confluence, digital documentation repository and SharePoint enterprise knowledge management portal, for example.

Here are seven proven ways for using Prolaborate to reach the right audience in the right way with your model information.

Access from anywhere, anytime
EA Models can be viewed anywhere, anytime from web browsers on tablets and PCs, using a simple, contemporary interface.

Prolaborate is outfitted with full Active Directory (AD) integration, so it’s easy to set up access permissions for sharing specific content to AD groups or individual users.  

But how about sharing information with non-EA users? Just take a URL from Prolaborate and embed it into tools such as emails, SharePoint pages, wiki articles, or intranet pages.

Prolaborate links are based on the structure of the underlying EA model, meaning that even if the model changes, the link will still work.

You can also embed live, interactive  views of EA diagrams, packages and elements in  enterprise knowledge management systems such as Confluence and SharePoint. Users can always view the most current information.

Let static images become a thing of the past. Team members can now work together on live diagrams.

Collaborate seamlessly
You can create different EA browsers for the same EA project, including browsers that only show models relevant to business users. Through a feature called Live Sync with EA Projects, end users are always shown the most up-to-date content.

Prolaborate connects to EA models directly, streamlining the transfer of contents between models and greatly minimizing HTML publishing and XML Model export efforts.

Prolaborate can keep designated stakeholders aware of changes to models. You can send out customized email and in-app notifications about model updates.

You can also discuss projects on-the-fly and receive immediate feedback. Create context-based discussions and send out invitations to engage all of your stakeholders and gather comments quickly.

Utilize collaborative workflows and export discussions as evidence.

Through Prolaborate’s search function, you can search across any EA information as well as any discussions and comments that users have generated. 

Create dynamic reports and charts
Enterprise Architecture includes several tasks that require careful analysis of EA models. Prolaborate provides a user experience-drive portal with advanced reporting dashboards and superior impact-analysis graphs based on EA data.

Through Prolaborate’s dynamic reporting capabilities, you can create reports and graphs to answer key business queries and present it to higher management.  

Users can click on the reports and graphs to get more detailed information, if needed.

Dashboards can also be customized by user for personalized experiences.

Simplify complex information
Prolaborate also features advanced model governance with granular access control. You can greatly reduce the degree of complexity displayed by controlling the visibility of packages and artifacts to various user groups.

By using built-in widgets to choose a mix of artifacts and attributes, you can create custom forms designed for different users.

Minimize information overload by removing unused or advanced tagged values.

End users see only what they’re interested in seeing.

Conduct Agile reviews
Speed up reviews by getting specialists to perform the detailed reviews and managers to approve based on their recommendations.  Design custom review dashboards and share these with all stakeholders.

Produce timed reviews utilizing any EA information and any combination of end users. All the review information and discussions will be documented in a single place.

Unify views across enterprise tools
Jira integration is a boon to teams using Jira for capturing user stories/issues and EA for modeling, use case definitions, and requirements.

In Prolaborate, it’s easy to create a bidirectional link between EA and Jira. You can view EA models and related Jira items in a single place.

Prolaborate also integrates with the EA add-on eaDocX to let you share and collaborate eaDocX documents from Prolaborate.

Without use of Prolaborate, current solutions require considerable data transfer between tools and data duplication to achieve unified views. Prolaborate greatly minimizes overhead.

Dashboards can also be customized by user for personalized experiences.

Integrate with Confluence / SharePoint
Create dynamic, self-refreshing, EA Model based pages in Confluence. You can also embed live, interactive views of EA diagrams, packages and elements in enterprise knowledge management systems such as SharePoint. Users can always view the most current information.

Let static images become a thing of the past. Team members can now work together on live diagrams.

In sum: Share and collaborate
As we’ve seen, Prolaborate enables seamless engagement and collaboration from the business community by simplifying the consumption of Sparx EA Models.

Visit www.prolaborate.com to learn more or reach out to Prolaborate through support@prolaborate.com for a quick demo.

This content provided by SD Times and Prolaborate

The post Industry Spotlight: 7 ways to maximize reach of Sparx Enterprise Architect models appeared first on SD Times.

Another, perhaps better way to see EA is as the one source of truth for the business and IT, enabling product and portfolio management, requirements gathering and management, and prioritization of projects, as well as other management tasks critical to the software development life cycle.

“EA was seen as an IT function, but it’s not just that,” said Owen, who spent time with architecture software company Popkin Software and Telelogic before moving on to IBM and now serving as CEO for IBM partner Corso, a consulting firm. “One of the age-old problems of enterprise architecture is showing the value of it. EA is becoming more aligned with the program management office and the business,” he said.

Corso in the next few months will launch a cloud-based version of its EA software, the Strategic Planning Platform, which clearly demonstrates the business value of EA. “It’s broadening the scope of EA to include portfolio management, and also looking at transition planning, reducing business initiatives, and project plans based on ideas and requirements within an organization,” said Owen.

He pointed out that organizations today have disparate sources of information. “We’ve got a lot of organizations doing lots of things around social media, and using it to have collaboration, certainly about thoughts threads and ideas. And then we’ve got other companies doing portfolio management…doing things like managing the project portfolio, timesheets and resource planning. Then there’s the EA community. We’re trying to bring those together. Let’s bring that together with the idea of prioritization and managing that as a portfolio, and mapping into the EA to get the one source of truth and then moving forward with very accurate project plans based on market needs and/or user needs, and feeding it all back through again. It’s a life cycle of strategic planning.”

In its first iteration of the Strategic Planning Platform, Corso is using IBM tooling, Owen said, including IBM Rational Focal Point for portfolio management, System Architect for the EA portion, and Composer, Requisite Pro or DOORS for requirements management.

“We’ve managed to get agreements to provide the software on a monthly basis, which is different from how IBM traditionally sells its software,” he said. “It’s definitely more accessible. This will front-end things like agile development and solution architectures.”

Requirements can be fed right to the top of the solution funnel, so that in an agile development shop, the workstreams “are all projects that should have derived value directly from the [Strategic Planning Platform],” said Owen.

He further explained that a business-intelligence layer runs through the platform, though it’s not focused on financials. “It’s how we ask certain questions of the [Strategic Planning Platform]. Typically, questions might be like, ‘Show me all the high-value customers that are affected by this project, which is overrunning.’ We harvest the data from something like Salesforce.com and map it back to the EA, into projects and the portfolio, and then you can ask really really good questions.”

Underpinning the platform is Rational Team Concert for change and configuration management, which Owen said is used to “manage transition plans in the EA.” Team Concert is built on IBM’s Jazz technology, and it supports the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration specification. OSLC allows object linking via an exposed API that carries the context of what the object is for the tool or tools that need to use it, so the object can be integrated into a web of data, eliminating point-to-point connection, Owen explained.

Because Corso’s planning platform supports OSLC, the company is looking to integrate multiple BPM and EA tools, along with the tools’ data and workflows. Meanwhile, Jazz provides the platform backbone for single sign-on, authentication and reporting.

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“The old approach was much more static,” he said. “It was, ‘Assume we have a fixed business model and how can technology meet its needs?’ to now saying, ‘Business needs always change, and it involves changing how we think about architecture.’ ”

Older frameworks, such as the Zachman Framework, only address “day one” and not the long term, he added. “Fundamentally, the Zachman Framework is ontology rather than a methodology. That is, it helps you organize concepts without telling you what to do with the concepts.” It leaves a gap between the artifacts and actually helping the business achieve what it wants to do, Bloomberg wrote in “The Beginning of the End for Enterprise Architecture Frameworks.”

He added that the addition of a methodology as a means for implementation of business goals could help, but he added that “a methodology will still not get you where you want to go. You still have a gap between the technology meeting the needs of the business when you assume they are always changing.

Colin Devonport, an enterprise architecture segment manager at IBM, said, “The premise is to make sure business goals become actionable plans that you can drive to obtain their benefits.”

Once an organization is clear on its goals, it has to look at individual options to see the impacts and decide what the best way is to go forward with the architecture, he explained. “But you can’t stop there. You have to be able to bridge these plans into the rest of the IT organization.

“It’s really about getting to the business value, and therefore you have to apply a long-lived method to associate with that,” Devonport added.

One approach that fuses ontology and methodology is Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture Framework (PEAF). Founded by software architect Kevin Smith, PEAF started in fragments in 2002 and has become a complete framework, with version 2 introduced in March of this year.

According to Smith, discourse in the enterprise architecture community about the best way to do EA comes from the confusion between what it is and what it really means. “A lot of people, when they use the word ‘framework,’ they mean a set of pegs on which you can hang things. Essentially, that is a metamodel. It describes the information that you might gather and put in an enterprise architecture,” he said.

“When I use the word ‘framework,’ I use it in a looser way. For me, it’s a collection of things, one of which is a metamodel, as well as processes, products, templates, etc.”

PEAF includes templates for preparation work, processes for the implementation stage (such as mitigating risk and setting up EA tools), to processes in the last phase (called “operate”), where EA is actually done, he said.

However, no matter how EA is defined or approached, there is no one right way to do it, and “though EA fundamentalists will argue that frameworks are an essential part of EA, I see them more as a tool,” said Jeff Scott, an analyst with Forrester Research.

He added: “I haven’t seen any data that suggests one or another framework has a significant impact on EA success. The real question is not how we build EA, but how we implement it.”

But to Bloomberg, new implementations of EA need to factor in constantly changing business needs. “Agility is a requirement just like other requirements,” he said. “Now it’s, ‘Build me something that changes as my needs change.’ ”

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