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Source: Wikipedia]
I decided to start this blog as a way to share the architecture related ideas and information I come across when discussing with clients, partners and colleagues. I do try to include something of my own whenever that rare opportunity occurs. ;-)
My background in architecture is mainly from my time with the Capgemini Group. Because of that, I am inclined to include business, information, information systems, infrastructure, governance and security as architecture aspect areas. Similarly, I tend to break the architecture into abstraction levels of contextual, conceptual, logical and physical. So you’ve been warned!
When I joined Microsoft as an Architect Evangelist (somewhat amusing title from Finnish perspective), I was positively surprised by some architecture related concepts within Microsoft. Related to business architecture the most exiting finding was the Motion methodology for discovering resilient business capabilities to base the service model on. The idea being that business capabilities change less often than business processes and are more similar between organisations within an industry.
Another well kept secret from outside world was the Connected Systems Model describing not only the traditional service orientation aspect of SOA, but also including the viewpoints of service consumption, workflows, identity and data federation. Not to forget modelling and management to unite the whole.
I’m accustomed to seeing different architecture aspect areas connected at the service level (business services supported by information system services that run on top of infrastructure services). But this line of thought was limited to architecture design time. The Dynamic Systems Initiative aims to extend this traceability into deployment and production time also. Imagine if distributed systems weaved out of several services could be deployed and reconfigured automatically. Metrics relevant to business decisions could be provided by smart systems management tools that understand the structure of systems and how they relate to business processes and goals.
Via this Plot, I hope to be able to share and exchange some insight on the role of architect and use of architecture as a tool for both business and IT. Some of the material will be in Finnish. I will be also writing about my other passion, photography.
I hope you find this Plot interesting, or at least slightly amusing ;-)