Paper Rogers sessions Flashcards
What two problems does EA assess?
- system complexity: organizations were spending more and more money on IT
- poor business alignement: much difficulty aligning expensive IT systems with business needs (difficult to create value)
Bottom line: even more cost, even less value. Large organizations can’t afford to ignore these problems.
What contextual problems will the frameworks be tested upon?
- IT systems that have become unmanageably complex and increasingly costly to maintain
- IT systems that are hindering the organization’s ability to respond t o current, and future, market conditions, in a timely and cost-effective manner
- Mission-critical information that is consistently out-of-date and/or just plain wrong
- A culture of distrust between business and technology sides in an organization
What is a blended methodology?
Choose bits and pieces from each of these methologies and modify and merge them accoring to the specific needs of your organization
What is the vision of Zachman’s framework (taxonomy)?
Zachman’s vision was that business value and agility could best be realized by a holistic
approach to systems architecture that explicitly looked at every important issue from every
important perspective
What bill required federal agencies to improve the effectiveness of their IT investments?
Clinger-Cohen act [04], also known as the Information Technology Management Reform Act.
What was the success rate of effective architecture management four years after the Clinger-Cohen bill?
20/96 had established at least the foundation for effective architecture management.
22 agencies increased in maturity since 2001
24 agencies decreased in maturity
47 agencies remained the same.
What case study was done?
MedAMore is a chain of drug stores, consisted of three programs (MAM/store, warehouse and home)
What are the three problems that MedAMore experienced?
- MAM/Store required regional specializations
- The regional warehouses that had been acquired through acquisition each had different
ways of receiving orders from the retail stores and different procedures from ordering
supplies from the wholesalers. Each of these differences required changes to the
MAM/Warehouse module. - Files were often delivered
late, sometimes not at all, and occasionally multiple times. This made it difficult for
the home office to access reliable, up-to-date financial information especially in the
area of sales and inventory.
What is the Zachman framework?
The [Enterprise Architecture] Framework as it applies to Enterprises is simply a
logical structure for classifying and organizing the descriptive representations of an
Enterprise that are significant to the management of the Enterprise as well as to the
development of the Enterprise’s systems. [13]
The Zachman “Framework” is actually a taxonomy for organizing architectural artifacts (i.e.,
design documents, specifications, models) that takes into account both who the artifact targets
(e.g., business owner, builder) and what particular issue (e.g., data, functionality) is being
addressed.
What two dimensional organizations are used to organize architectural artifacts in the building industry?
- The various players in the game (many different stakeholders)
- The descriptive focus of the artifact, the wat, how, where, who, when, why of the project (this is an independent dimension)
What three suggestions can help MedAMore in the development of MAM-EA?
- Every architectural artifact should live in one and only one cell
- A architecture can be considered complete only when every cell in that architecture is complete
- cells in columns should relate to each other
What five ways can the Zachman grid help in the development of MAM-EA?
- ensure that every stakeholder’s perspective has been considered for every descriptive focal point
- improve the MAM-EA artifacts themselves by sharpening each of their focus points to one particular concern for one particular audience
- ensure that all of Bret’s business requirements can be traced down to some technical implementation
- convince Bret that Irma’s technical team isn’t planning on building a bunch of useless functionality
- convince Irma that the business folks are including het IT folks in their planning
In what four categories does TOGAF divide an enterprise architecture?
- business architecture: Describes the processes the business uses to meet its goals
- application architecture: Describes how specific applications are designed and how
they interact with each other - data architecture: Describes how the enterprise datastores are organized and
accessed - technical architecture: Describes the hardware and software infrastructure that
supports applications and their interactions
What is the most important part of the TOGAF framework?
Architecture development method (ADM). It is a recipe/process for creating architecture.
What are the layers of the TOGAF enterprise continuum?
- Enterprise continuum
- Foundation Architectures: apply in theory to any IT organization in the universe
- Common system architectures: these are the principles that one would expect to see in many - but perhaps not all- types of enterprises
- Industry Architecture: principles that are specific to across many enterprises that are part of the same domain
- Organizational Architecture specific to a given enterprise
