Stephen Cohen's thoughts on Enterprise Architecture

Back from our information safari, its time to munge (that’s a technical term) through the end-users naratives(stories), legacy systems information (relics), and our own notes (journals) collected along the way in hopes of piecing the truth together. Not...

Being service oriented (SO) is, and continues to prove itself to be, a valuable and elegant approach for applications as well as enterprise architectures. However I am a bit baffled by why an architecture which is service oriented is being branded a new...

High quality applications are simple. They do some one thing well. The classic example is the famous Hello World app. It simple displays the text back to the caller. While there are vast language dependant permutations lets follow our own advice, keep...

In Step 3, I touched on how legacy choices might significantly impact the design of enterprise components. Now we need to incorporate the broader needs of the business into our design which will likely reverse some of the simplifications applied in the...

Application development code is too focused and too volatile to be promoted across the enterprise, and enterprise code is too generic and too hard to change for it to precisely address application needs. Coming to an agreement on these ownership / boundaries...

Selecting the right mix of abstract and domain components is crucial to achieving an appropriate balance between investment and return. Many a project has fallen into the tar pits of extreme analysis and overly complex inheritance hierarchies. It may...

Enterprise architects are responsible for providing simple, effective, enterprise worthy, domain components to the application developers. So what makes a good domain component? It must provide quantifiable BUSINESS value over time . This may be the result...

I am a big fan of risk management in all projects. It is however generally rare to see risks identified when developing an enterprise architecture. On the one hand, this seems to make sense. Enterprise architectures are there to address the shared risks...

A common phrase used to describe an enterprise architecture is a set of “living documents”. I like it. Short, simple, easy to understand … a living document. Of course there is a dangerously complex implication lying just below the veneer...

I have mentioned in prior blogs my belief that an enterprise architecture is comprised of 3 intertwined components; standards, governance, and a repository of binaries. I will address standards and binaries later. For now, I will focus on the...

Most of us can agree that there is always more than one way to achieve a given piece of functionality. Consider getting a phone number for a person from a Sql database. You can connect with integrated security, or pass in the username &...

Enterprise architects are the one star generals of their business. They have some authority. Usually less than their subordinates believe they have, and more than their superiors and peers want them to have. Ultimately, it comes down to the individual...

During the last step we began scratching the surface of the needs of the enterprise. Clearly it was too broad a description to make any significant architectural decisions. Agile practices provide us a simple and effective approach to address this......

Developing a broadly available set of services upon which your enterprise will rest is a daunting task. Typically difficult issues such as performance, scale, and availability need to reach 10 or 100 times that of a single application. Consider a simple...

So you have an enterprise architecture ... How well does it work? Here is a quick test, a mere 5 questions, intended to help evaluate it. But first a few rules; This is only applicable to DEPLOYED architectures. Generally, deployed means stable...

Now that we have gathered some initial information we need to sort it out. Actually its more complicated than just sorting, we need to find the patterns in what we have as well as see the missing parts for what they should be. Here's how I do it; First...

In the last step we decided that a combination of federation and centralization will suit the enterprise best. So the underlying question is; what parts are centralized and what parts are federated? The answer is ... it depends! There are a variety of...

Just as the selection of materials has a substantive impact on the form and function of a structure, the concrete choices made by an enterprise have undeniable impacts on the form and function of the enterprise architecture. Creating products without...

When: October 8-9th Where: Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington DC Registration link: Register online here Description of the Conference: The response to the Washington DC ITARC has been amazing. Attendance is way up thanks to many organizations sending their...

Many discussions of how-to-do architecture talk about modeling the domain 'as-is' then defining the 'to-be' state. In general I agree, clearly defining the problem before identifying the solution is a risk mitigation technique. By focusing on the current...

Step with me if you will onto the slippery slope of enterprise architecture definition. I try to capture the boundaries of the enterprise in a single simple layered boxes-and-lines diagram. Relationships are conveyed through adjacency and separation helps...

The enterprise architecture team is responsible for exposing core functionality in ways that support the application teams. But how is that best done? I would like to propose a combination of 3 approaches: * Registration al la...

I spent most of yesterday going through 60+ verbose PowerPoint slides and 45 pages of detailed requirements. You see I have a customer who has run into several issues rooted in their initial design considerations. They are a CMM level 3 organization with...

How big is your enterprise? It turns out to be a very difficult question to answer. Consider this simple scenario; You have a newspaper delivery route. Your supplier pays you as a contractor. You receive the newspapers each morning from another...

Two skills have served me well while gathering information about an enterprise. First, the lessons it has been my pleasure to have learned from my customers and the many, many, bright practioners I have been lucky enough to work with. Second, the ability...