Business innovation and emerging trends

Wanted to start this part of the blog by showing this beautiful description of the various trends that flow into waves and at the end help in forming what is called business innovation.

As you can see it takes a lot of elements to form the end product of business innovation. Technology trends, experiences from the past projects, business models that were the final product of endless Enterprise Architectural analysis session, society playing one of the major roles, and an endless list of innovation management elements that in turn create a package known as business innovation. This is an essence of innovation programs, and innovation activities, its best practices.  The target leaders for such type of models are CXOs, Business and Unit leads, Strategic advisors, essentially everyone who is looking to innovate and create something new for their organization.

Another great example or reference in the Gartner article by which business is innovated is what is known as a STREET model. It is comprised of Scope, Track, Rank, Evangelize, Evaluate, and Transfer.

Looking at the societal trends, it is also very important to utilize the methodologies above to get an edge over the competition. To gain a competitive advantage, it is very essential to spend time on all the elements (technology trends, societal impacts, etc). This will not only help with designing a strategy and a trend, but also a path towards a common goal of innovation.

Reference: https://www.gartner.com/doc/1938314/agenda-business-innovation-emerging-trends

Innovation, maturity model, and Enterprise Architecture

According to Gartner, the innovation maturity model is structured into five maturity levels:

• Reactive
• Active
• Defined
• Performing
• Persuasive

For the organizations to progress, Gartner further breaks down the levels of innovation into further 6 categories:

• Strategy and Intent : Enterprises show their intent by having their leaders come up with various strategic plans that focus towards innovation.
• Processes and Practices : having a formal set of process enables the leaders of the organization to facilitate innovative ideas, in other ways, having a more organized, quantitative way of creating scenarios for innovation.
• Culture and People : Understanding the social behavior is very important, especially during innovation, and when the organization diverse culture is an influential factor.
• Organization and Infrastructure : Important to support and help facilitate the innovators within the organization.
• Partnerships : Having partnerships with the outside organizations that promote the idea of innovation is very critical for the success of the organization.
• Open Innovation : 

I agree with the Gartner article, that while applying these maturity models, enterprise architects should keep in mind the following;

- mature management should constantly work on improving there processes to come up with innovation all the time

- Enterprises and their parent companies should make every effort to determine if innovation is is managed locally versus centrally.

Refernce: https://www.gartner.com/doc/1621015/maturity-model-innovation-management

Enterprise Architecture and Innovation

This blog is all about how Enterprise Architecture processes, if introduced within the organization can help in driving innovation. Emergence of new technologies and more efficient processes will in turn increase the productivity of the company as a whole.

By following various steps as introduced by Enterprise Architecture, such as new concepts, creating proof of concepts that will lead to prototype building, and at the end piloting / rolling out beta product to a controlled group will help lead innovation within the organizations. This shows that EA (Enterprise Architecture) not only facilitates the organization in finding gaps, maturity level, but also can help drive innovation. Below picture explains visually the flow of innovation within the organization utilizing enterprise architecture as its major facilitator.

Furthermore, Enterprise Architecture equips leaders to build individual teams/ focus groups where their full time job is to utilize the findings from Enterprise Architecture studies, and create solutioning around it in order to introduce innovation, and develop creative products.

Best practices for business architecture

Lets switch gears and reflect on the best practices for business architecture.

According to Gartner, at a high level the best business practices are

• Getting agreement on enterprise business architecture definition : this would help ensure that everyone within the organization is on the same page as long as the understating of the core definition is concerned.
• Define and socialize a common language across the enterprise , or standardization.: standardization is a key to ensure compliance within an enterprise.
• Focusing on higher level business capabilities: Once the high level business capabilities are defined, it becomes easier to add elements at a more granular level according to solution's and keeping in context with the current and the future state of the organization.
• Creating a business driven line of sight: this is very essential as its creates an enterprise wide focus and goal of the entire organization. By creating one vision company wide, focused strategies can be developed to ensure the success of the project.
• Understanding stakeholders pain and passion points: this is very essential as stalehodlers are essential to any organization. It is very important to take into consideration their passion and pain points, so that they can be involved in every strategic planning of the organization, and also necessary to maintain their interest along the way.
• Increasing stakeholder buy - in : Goes along with the earlier point.

Other best practices involve defining and designing strategic maps, road maps, map of organization political landscape, including social networks, political relationships, and spheres of influence.

Ref: https://www.gartner.com/doc/869116/best-practices-enterprise-business-architecture

Business Architecture to understand the future state

According to Gartner "Enterprise Business Architecture is a part of the EA process that describes through a set of requirements, principles , and models the future state, the current state, and the guidance necessary to flexibly evolve and optimize business dimensions to achieve effective enterprise change".

By defining the rules, processes in a business architectural layer for the current state, an organization can understand where they are, and they can make certain strategic decisions to get to the future state. The goal of enterprise business architecture is to ensure that the changes and enhancements to business functions, process, financials, people and organizational structure are fully optimized in support of the business strategy (ref course notes).

This architectural layer translates "upstream" business vision and strategy by leveraging common requirements from the business context into contextual, conceptual, logical, and implementation level requirements.

The figure below illustrates that business functions and subfunctions may be supported by a collection of complete and partial processes.

Some of the critical influences are

1. Compliance

2. Ecosystem

3. Culture and Politics

4. Industry

5. Innovation

6. Behavior

7. Time

Ref: https://www.gartner.com/doc/687409/understand-enterprise-business-architecture-realize

Business Architecture layer

This weeks topic is to reflect on the business architecture layer and its relationship to the enterprise information technology architecture.
When i hear the word business architecture, things like business processes, strategic directions, underlying business rules come in mind. Over the course of the weeks, i have talked about different architectural layers, from technology to security. But without having a well defined business layer, that surrounds the processes, strategic road maps, and rules, the organization is deficient.

According to Gartner " Business architecture is an EA process that delivers business values to the enterprise producing several things; such as:

1. Strategic requirements of the enterprise
2. Models of the future state
3. Road map of the change initiatives
4. Requirements, principles, standards and guidelines that will steer the implementation of change initiatives."

By standardizing the rules, principles, and requirements that are established on companies policies and rules need to be well defined. A business architecture layer is the one that brings all the other architecture layers together. The rules, goals of the enterprise which are defined at this stage act as dependencies for the rest of the architectural layer within an organization. These rules and processes also define the interaction of the organization with its external vendors.

According to Wikipedia, Business architecture is "A part of an enterprise architecture related to corporate business, and the documents and diagrams that describe the architectural structure of that business."

Business architecture with the help of business analysts define the functional structure of an enterprise in terms of its business services and business information. 

Cloud computing and security

With the increasing adoption of cloud based infrastructures, it has become more important than ever to make sure that the security architecture is well thought through. A thorough risk assessment is needs to be put in place to examine multiple technical, procedural, and organizational issues.

Gartner describes cloud computing as being "scalable" and "elastic", and provided as a service. Since its easier to scale nowadays, it is fairly important to analyse and take into consideration a number of risk assessment challenges that cannot be fully addressed with process oriented evaluations.

Complexity and Exposure complicate assessment

As shown in the figure above, the computing model is mapped into a two dimensional model. This complexity ranges from complexity running on 1 host to distributed across a large number of hosts.
Relatively less information is needed to assess the security posture of systems that are run by corporate staff, using familiar technology. The blue area in the middle refers to the risk compromise area. The services in the upper right yellow area are complex and highly exposed. Here the administrators are strangers and virtually everything happens in the public domain. Ref: https://www.gartner.com/doc/1324114/analyzing-risk-dimensions-cloud-saas

Best Practices - Security Architecture and Enterprise Architecture

The more closely aligned the security architecture is to enterprise architecture, the more effective it will be. It should be a goal of an organization to complete the integration of security into EA .

Gartner  highlights a lot of best practices when it comes to security architecture that i want to highlight in this blog

• Security Architecture should be a continuous process
• It improves over time, and is improved with the experiences an organization gets over time
• The templates are created / developed in order to maintain compliance within the organization
• The design should be enabled by iteration with increasingly detailed levels of abstraction

Leveraging both the architectural principles and the methods in the security program of the organization can enable improvements in business alignment, maintain consistency and reuse. However it is a complex strategy that requires experience, practice and patience. 

Ref: https://www.gartner.com/doc/790521/aligning-security-architecture-enterprise-architecture

In my next part of the blog, i will talk about how security is increasingly getting important in cloud space. I will spend some time analyzing the risk involved with cloud and SaaS computing, and use case models for choosing security - appropriate SaaS (Software as a Service)

Enterprise Security Architecture - Overview

Security is always a hot topic. In today's blog i will reflect on how much security is essential for an enterprise. Without security, any organization whether small or large is prone to breaches. We hear every other day about the breaches in health companies, credit card numbers stolen, all this is a result of not a well thought out security layer in a companies infrastructure.
Whenever an organization starts their web presence that involves transactions, storing or transferring PII (personal data), they have to make sure to set up a well defined security layer that makes sure that the organization is protected from the phishing scams and breaches. That the data is well protected as it contains customer sensitive information.
According to the content in one of my class notes, there are five main areas of security for consideration

• Computing Security: Type of security that focuses on secure operations of the computers.
• Data Security : Ensuring that the data is secured and is protected from tampering.
• Application Security: Trying to prevent the errors and breaches in the security that can occur through errors in the design, development or deployment of an application.
• Information Security
• Network Security: Refers to the protection of network resources from unauthorized use. Intranet/ internal network security is essential for a company. This is essential because most of the companies assume that the breach in the security comes from external sources, but what they forget to take into consideration is the compromise that happens from within the system.
• Isolation: this is where the concept of firewalls come into picture.  This is to isolate certain apps from the others. These help in isolating the apps from general usage or unauthorized success.

Depending on what the focus of the organization is, a combination of these security areas will be helpful to create a well defined security layer that will protect the enterprise from the outside breaches.

According to Wikipedia "Enterprise Information Security Architecture is the practice of applying a comprehensive and rigorous method for describing a current and/or future structure and behavior for an organizations security processes , information security systems, personnel and organizational sub units, so that they align with the organization's core goals and strategic direction."

Cloud offerings

An interesting article on cloud services to be managed with right technology resources by Gartner; https://www.gartner.com/doc/2366916/manage-cloud-services-right-roles

With the increase in cloud services, it is very important to pick up right technology resources to establish a well defined cloud space for your organization. This means that this cloud space is flexible in terms of data, but also is secured to protect from malicious activities.

As pointed in the article, the CSB (cloud service brokerage) role will be very effective in the organization that is promoting usage of cloud services. The three primary CSB roles are

1. Aggregation Brokerage
2. Integration Brokerage
3. Customization Brokerage

The CSB will be responsible to assess what type of cloud services a customer requires, and customer demands and requirements for cloud services.

As pointed out in the article, which i also agree with is that the people in CSB role need to be proficient in cloud technologies and services as they play a very critical role in defining the next steps that will take the organization from its current maturity level to the next level of engaging with new technologies. With the CSB roles, the next defining factor is cloud management platforms or CMPs.

According to Gartner, Cloud Management Platforms are integrated products that provide for the management of public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. CMPs are incorporated within the organization by IT personnel to deliver technical cloud services to internal customers. Since these platforms are managed in cloud, they offer a faster delivery of services thus lowering the overall cost of technology. CMPs work very closely with IAAS (infrastructure as a service) platform. 

In order to summarize, CMP alongwith CSB role in an enterprise can help an organization to be more efficient in engaging with new emerging technologies such as cloud computing.

Couple things that need to be accounted for while coming up with a CMP/ CSB model, referring the gartner article

1. evaluating CMP for a hybrid cloud approach

2. Weighing options as an organization for an appropriate cloud offering vendor.

3. can the CSB aggregation tools offer an expanded option of external cloud services to internal users/ customers

4. to implement CSB, CMP tools at the portal level

 

Network Architecture - a subcomponent of technology infrastructure architecture

An important subcomponent of technology infrastructure architecture is Network Architecture.

In order to transfer information within and outside the organization, communication between resources, talking to the backed servers, databases, applications (external and internal), in all of this we need a well defined, secured network. Network is nothing but a component that keeps everything connected. In the absence of a well defined, secured, consistent network, the organization will not be able to talk to its various applications, and hence this will lead to a communication/ technology blackhole within the enterprise.

With more solutions being cloud and mobile based, it has become even more essential to define and design a network plan that can not only keep the applications and connection alive but can also handle heavy data traffic.Thus, it is important as a technology infrastructure architect to design a self sustained highly secured network diagram that is well equipped to fight malicious viruses, as well as be able to securely and efficiently let the communication flow.

An example of physical network infrastructure diagram from technet: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc961037.aspx

Overview - Technology Infrastructure

In my previous blog, i talked about big data concepts and how data is very important and essential to an enterprise as a whole. In today's blog, i will be giving my overview on technology infrastructure, major trends surrounding this layer and understanding the opportunities.

Technology layer supports both hardware and software technology. According to http://www.enterprise-architecture.org/techology-architecture-tutorials/58-techology-architecture-overview , technology layer is split into three views; Conceptual, Logical and Physical.

1. Conceptual layer: The question of "what", meaning what technology capabilities are required to provide the appropriate technology infrastructure for the enterprise
2. Logical layer: The question of "how", meaning how the technology infrastructure for the enterprise will be achieved. 
3. Physical Layer: this captures the implementation and deployments of technology in the enterprise.

How is this different from a system architecture? According to the chapter read " While system architecture, applied specifically within the context of information systems, encompasses both the application architecture and data assets, and their logical interrelations to the business processes they support; the technical architecture describes in detail the software and hardware capabilities to fully enable such application and data services" In other words, system architecture provides an umbrella over application architecture and data assets, whereas technical architecture focuses on the software and hardware capabilities to support system architecture. Technology architecture is dependent on application architecture and hence it is very important to make sure that within an enterprise various components of an application architecture are well defined. A very detailed mapping needs to happen between both technology and application architecture, so that both of them can work in sync and be overall beneficial to the enterprise.

Big Data Disruptions, best practices

In my previous two blogs I touched upon what is data architecture, how it is important, overview and its relationship with the Information architectural layer.
This blog I wanted to touch on the best practices for Data Stewardship and the big data disruptions.

Lets start with what is Data Stewardship? According to http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/definition/data-stewardship, data stewardship is the management and oversight of an organizations' data assets to help provide business users with high quality data that is easily accessible in a consistent manner. These roles are common in organizations that are attempting to exchange data precisely and consistently between computer systems and also making them available for reusability in the future (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_steward)

Some of the benefits of data stewardship that I see, with reference to those listed in wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_steward

• consistent use of data management resources
• easier mapability between various computer systems
• lower costs during migration
• avoiding redundancy and overlapping of information across the layers
• compliant with the organizations informational layer
• reusability

Now lets focus on some of the viewpoints shared in a Gartner article (https://www.gartner.com/doc/554646/best-practices-data-stewardship)

- data quality needs to be considered within a business process
- need of an effective governance strategy for data quality across the entire organization

 With big data comes the efforts of managing this large amount of complex data within an organization. If the data quality is not maintained, as noted in the Gartner article, it can lead to the failing of many strategic business initiatives. Programs such as CRM (customer relationship management), BI will not be able to generate enough business if the quality of the data is not improved. The article talks about various ways in which this problem can be alleviated. One of the proposal that I don't completely agree with is " stewards residing in business and not in IT organization". In my opinion, even though we identify that the business is responsible for the quality of data, stewards should reside in the middle layer that connects both business and IT. As much as Data stewards need to understand the business, they also need to understand IT infrastructure, so that they can make sound decisions when it comes to harnessing data with quality, and if the current data architecture of the organization can even sustain such proposal. The only way data stewards can be respected within the organization is if they have a combined knowledge of both business and IT infrastructure. Having one of the two will not give them a holistic perspective of the entire data setup within the enterprise architectural layer.

Data steward in the middle of Business and IT layer


 

Lets quickly touch on various roles/ responsibilities of data steward (ref: https://www.gartner.com/doc/554646/best-practices-data-stewardship)

• ensuring the consistency and accuracy of data
• implementing governance tasks and achieving data quality metrics
• responsibility in master data management objectives
• identifying issues with source systems
• updating and maintaining documentation, taxonomies
• proactively finding errors/ bugs or issues within data
• ensuring data is compliant with industry standards

Lets shift gears and talk a little on Big Data Disruptions. Ref another Gartner article (https://www.gartner.com/doc/1964716/big-data-disruptions-tamed-enterprise)

Big data is an eye opener to the challenges that are being faced by the organizations on a daily basis related to data. It provides an insight to the deepest levels of the organizations, their relationships within the company and outside the company. If not handled properly by the business/ enterprise architects, they big data challenge can have a negative impact. Some of these impacts are, also as discussed in the Gartner article, reference above,

• although big data shows patterns on data types, if this information is not turned into a competitive advantage, then there is no use in spending money on all of these tools.
• big data will give a visual representation of cultural issues to business and IT leaders, this can be a positive impact, since the leaders can identify and work on solving these issues in a more proactive and effective manner

I do want to highlight one point that is mentioned in the Gartner article (ref URL above); "big data creates business value by enabling organizations to uncover previously unseen patterns, and to develop sharper insights about business environments". I strongly agree with this statement, since I believe Big data makes an organization very powerful, since they have a better understanding of the business processes within their environment, and the steps they can proactively take to either enhance the processes or work on the gaps and issues that got identified during this process.

Big Data - Handle with Care
 

To summarize, as long as we as an organization understand the criticality and importance of Big Data, convert the findings through data mining into effective and impactful strategies, as an organization we can be more efficient, have stronger relationships with our employees, vendors and other organizations.
 

Relationship between Information architecture and Data architectural layer

Data and information layers are interconnected in my opinion. According to Platt (2002), and as mentioned in one of my course readings " the information layer describes data that the organization needs to run its business processes and applications", in other words, without data information layer cant exists, and vice versa.
While we are working on streamlining data architecture within the information layer, it is important to take into consideration, and something that a data architect should keep in mind;

• data recovery
• data modeling and analytics related to the organization
• data handling
• big data usage and how it can be used within the enterprise
• data security, when the data is being used from outside the organization
• data storage, whether its physical servers or cloud.
• easy data accessibility and availability

From my experiences in the Information Systems domain, we have to be very careful in layering the data layer. This layer not only interacts with the inner architectural layers within an enterprise but it also talks/ interacts with the external applications both for in flow and out flow of the information. To ensure that this is well detailed, the use of data modeling/ UML diagrams and analytics software come into use, and allow us as architects to get a visual of the entire process. This also helps in cleaning out redundancy, overlapping of information assets, that could arise over the course of the data flow/ information flow within the enterprise.

A great blog that I ran across on IBM, layers the interaction of data in the BI (Business Intelligence world), data repositories, data warehouse architecture,  http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/techarticle/dm-0505cullen/
One of the diagrams that really caught my eye is where the analytics layer that provides the business analytic applications and their underlying capabilities and services, adding value to all areas in the enterprise.

Referencing http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/techarticle/dm-0505cullen/part4image3.gif

 

Data Architecture - quick overview

Over the past couple weeks, i have talked about Enterprise Architecture as an overview, the various layers within it, and about application architecture. In this weeks blog, i will discuss about Data Architecture. As the name suggests, data architecture is the way data is organized. Just as the application architectural layer is important, for this layer to work we need data. That is why I feel it is very essential to have a well organized and consistent data flow throughout the architectural layers in order to maintain consistency overall. It is essentially a lifeline to the entire enterprise.

Data - lifeline to all the architectural layers

This brings me to the other topic where data is either in house production or is being fed by the dependent applications. In order to ensure that we are getting a constant supply of data from the outside systems, it is very important to have a consistent and systematic infrastructure in place. The way we can achieve this by proper planning using data models and the other tools that are available in the marketplace. Here is a quick wiki link to the various data modeling tools and their comparisons.

Since the data architectural layers value is in its planning and predictability model, the data architect divides the information into 3 architectural processes as noted in my classroom readings;

• Conceptual
• Logical
• Physical

where all three processes represent three different components, such as conceptual is for business entities; logical is the logic behind these entities interaction; and physical is the meaning behind where and how are we sharing and storing data (servers, history, integration, analytics, etc.)


 

Enterprise Application Architecture overview

Application Architecture, one of the core components that act as one of the core pillars for the entire enterprise. When i think about application architecture, i think about the architectural layer that binds all the other layers, such as business, information, technology.
Application architecture and the architect who works in this domain is responsible for the overall applications within an enterprise. It becomes very important then to be able to size the entire applications within the organization ensuring that they can work in sync with each other.
As noted in our Lesson 2 discussion, as an Enterprise Application architect, below are some of the important things that need to be kept in mind

1. understanding all the applications within the organization
2. ensuring that these applications are in sync with each other
3. keeping a close watch to the workings of these applications
4. being up to date with the technology to ensure that the applications are compliant with the organization.
5. Sizing and scalability needs to be determined, so as to ensure that there are enough servers to support the different applications, to prevent server crashes resorting into disaster recovery situations.

In short, application architectural layer according to me is the core pillar that builds an enterprise and includes all the applications within the organization. Very close attention is needed in the working of the application architectural layer.

As addressed in wiki "Applications architecture is the science and art of ensuring the suite of applications being used by an organization to create the composite architecture is scalable, reliable, available and manageable. Simply put, if this layer is flexible, and easily manageable, it will ensure the success of an organization and increase in the efficiency.

Lets talk about the major components that are integral for a successful application architectural layer;

• Collaboration layer - ERP solutions - making one big platform for all the different business units within the organization Ref: http://www.cio.com/article/2439502/enterprise-resource-planning/erp-definition-and-solutions.html
• Relationship layer - CRM - ensuring that the company understands its customers/ stakeholders Ref: http://www.cio.com/article/2439505/customer-relationship-management/crm-definition-and-solutions.html
• Management - Supply Chain Management ref: http://www.cio.com/article/2439493/supply-chain-management/supply-chain-management-definition-and-solutions.html
• BI/ Analytics - analyzing raw data ref: http://www.cio.com/article/2439504/business-intelligence/business-intelligence-definition-and-solutions.html
• SOA - service oriented architecture  ref: http://www.cio.com/article/2439274/service-oriented-architecture/soa-definition-and-solutions.html

Components that build Application Architectural layer

Enterprise Application Integration & Application Architect

After discussing about Application Architecture and the future trends in this architectural layer, now lets talk about enterprise application integration. I have been mentioning application architect in my previous posts as well, and I will try to involve the Application Architect in this post as well.

Enterprise Application Integration is a very new concept. I think of it as a mix and match activity, where as an organization you hash out the various components you need to make your application architectural layer, and then shop for those in the outside world. Essentially rather than reinventing, utilizing the resources from vendors, and then molding them to best work with your organization.
While this sounds exciting, a lot of work is done behind the curtain to create such type of solutions.
As an architect working with the concept of EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), he/she needs to keep some things in mind;

• what is the goal/ objective of this activity?
• what type of solution are we looking at?
• assessing the internal organization, and then researching external market for options?
• what will be the return on investment (ROI). Would this be cheaper or an internal engineering might be cheaper for us?
• Once the goals are hashed, the architect needs to start matching these goals with the vendor applications. Are the applications flexible and easy to be maintained?
• what will be the knowledge curve once installed within my enterprise?
• short term versus long term advantage of this solution?

Lets talk some more about a basic approach to tackle some of these questions as mentioned in one of the Gartner artciles (ref: https://www.gartner.com/doc/2005116/identify-right-basic-approach-application), these are

• Custom Point to point integration
• On Premises Integration Platforms
• iPaaS
• Integration brokerage

However, there are four basic approach, which one is right for your organization is something that needs to be explored and researched upon.

Lets shift our focus and talk about application architect , role and why they are essential to an organization.Referencing the Gartner article; https://www.gartner.com/doc/2407415/defining-roles-responsibilities-application-architect  and another blog https://www.future-processing.pl/blog/role-of-the-application-architect/
Application architect comes after Enterprise Architect, and systems architect. They are also known as Software Architect as they are very close to the development/ IT layer. Since the application architect is very close to the technology layer, he/she has a better understanding of the applications and their dependencies within the organization, and they are able to better work on guiding the organization towards a more robust and an efficient application architectural layer.

Different architect roles

Application Architecture - Current Trends

In my previous post, i talked about the overview of Application Architecture and how it performs a critical role within the organization, in this post i will share my thoughts on the current trends of the application architectural layer.

With the emergence of cloud computing and technology, it is very evident that the future of application architecture is tapping into cloud space. SaaS, cloud computing is the answer for this, and that more and more enterprises are going towards this solution. I am a big supporter of cloud computing, and might sound biased by saying that if somebody wants their enterprise to be on the cutting edge of technology and reach the masses, cloud is your road to take. The infrastructural cost is very minimal, and the share of knowledge is as fast as the speed of light.
There was a time in our lives, atleast when i was growing up that we shared information on the floppy disc, CD roms, and then came USB devices and now everything is in the cloud. The ability for me to access my documents and talk to my grad school peers sitting in India, share my documents over the inter-webs is something more than extraordinary. Just thinking about this solution on an enterprise level, as an application architect, my work would be less busy as their is one less thing i have to worry about (the physical servers). To be able to size my servers on the go, add solutions like ERP, CRM to manage my stakeholders, i go from 0 to 60 in much less time than physical architectural setup. This goes without saying that more focus is needed around compliance and security, but atleast we got our applications all in sync and flexible that can be molded in any form an organization wants in.

Although i went on and on about the advantages of cloud computing as a future trend setter, good things always come with some cautions. Some of the impediments as also mentioned in a cloud computing article (ref: http://www.cio.com/article/2431187/cloud-computing/the-case-against-cloud-computing--part-one.html) are;

• Some enterprise apps are so native that they cant be migrated conveniently
• Risk with legal, regulatory, business areas, basically not being compliant
• management of cloud applications
• lack of SLA
• Lack of cost advantage for cloud computing

In order to work on these impediments, as an Application Architect, one has to do a thorough research of the enterprise apps, and organize them between the ones that can be migrated conveniently versus the ones that are legacy apps, and cant be moved. Then the process of prioritization comes into picture where it needs to be decided whether the legacy apps are important for the company and/ or if they can be upgraded to newer and faster solutions. Compliance is another component that needs to be factored in this research process. Once all this is determined, money or topic of cost to the company is the biggest topic of conversation. Questions like "whether it makes sense for the company to move to the cloud? " , " how many apps are legacy apps, and cant be migrated to the cloud?", " how much money its going to take to move the entire apps to the cloud?", etc. These questions need to be answered and the plan needs to be put in place to ensure that the application architecture of an organization can align with the current trends of technology.

Advantages of a well planned stack in an Enterprise

My previous two blog posts talked about enterprise architecture and how there is a close relationship between the concept of stacking and the principles behind EA. In this post i want to reflect upon the various advantages i can think of when the stacking is done right within an enterprise.

As we all know by now that there are 5 very important layers that essentially play a role of a backbone for an Enterprise. These layers if planned strategically and in compliance with the companies policies can result in an architecture that is strong, organized, and can sustain any adversities over the years both inside and outside. This is similar to building a house, making sure that the foundations are laid down, a strong foundation means a strong home, then the pillars are added for the support system, the walls and insulation for the protection of the house from the outside harsh climates while keeping the heat/ cold to not escape from the house, having windows and various different outlets for the interaction with the outside world, and then the roof on top to make sure that the house is closed from all ends in order to protect it from outside forces.

You must be thinking why i am giving you this analogy. My thought behind this analogy is to compare the amount of work that went into constructing a house to building a self sustained, organized, efficient architecture within an organization layer by layer. By having a well thought through strategic plan that focuses on the five different architectural layers stacked on top of each other, an EA can ensure a sustained enterprise. The advantages of a well planned stack are:

1. Low maintenance cost - there will be low cost in the long run, since the layers were designed keeping in mind all the dependencies they will have with internal and external entities.
2. Well connected - the layers within the organization will be well connected, as they are interdependent on each other. They will have a close knit network.
3. Improved communications - because of the closed knit network in place, there will be open communications between these different layers, that will help keep everyone in the organization on the same page, and the same view/ goals will flow from the top of the layer till the bottom
4. Efficiency/ Higher Productivity: The open communication channel will increase the efficiency within the various sub orgs within the enterprise.
5. Identifying Gaps: with the layers all planned and laid out in a compliant, consistent manner, it will be easy to identify the gaps (if any) and work on them in a well organized and efficient manner.
6. Secured

These are some of the few advantages that i can think of from the top of my head by involving the concept of stacking within the enterprise. That is also the reason why i believe that EA and concepts of stacking have a very close relationship with each other. 

Quick introduction to Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture is defined in several ways and its use changes from one organization to another. However, the meaning behind any of these definitions is the same, to help an organization with their architectural layer, the four most important being  Business, Data, Technology, and application.

As mentioned in the course, EA represents the different layers that includes improving the organizations:

1. goals and objectives
2. organizational structure and processes
3. data and technology infrastructure
4. system and applications

All  of these activities are used to streamline the business processes within an organization, improving technology infrastructure in order to improve the overall efficiency of the system.

Nowadays, besides the four layers mentioned above, the fifth layer (Security Architectural layer) is becoming popular as well. With the increase in online presence, and companies everyday dumping their data in cloud, it is but obvious that serious focus needs to shift towards security layer within an organization as well. It is even more important to make sure that the security layer is well thought through and put into place, so as to protect the company and its data from any data breaches in the future.

The five architectural layers mentioned above are all interdependent with each other, as you will find in my following posts.

Interconnected architectural layers in the form of a stack