- The purpose of the Best Practices (2BK)
- to streamline the process of getting to an enterprise architecture, which in turn should help improve the probablility of achieving the organization's mission. (2BL)
- Will improve the consistency of EA products (2BM)
- reduce cost and improve quality in meeting business need. (299)
- Who are the ultimate users of the best practices: (2BN)
- Enterprise Architects and Enterprise Management (29D)
- CIO and the senior management team must see the EA to be more than a legal requirement. It must add value to the enterprise. (29A)
- Moving from an implicit EA to an explicity EA will lead to a clarification of the mission of the organization and a focusing of the use of resources towards meeting the mission of the agencies. (29B)
- There is an implicit EA if you don't specifically define one. For example: The result is a lack of clarity in the website instead of reflecting the goals of the organization. (29C)
- To what extent to maturity models and certification standards make sense as best practices (2BR)
- improves education, tracability, and accountability (2BS)
- for example: CMM has taught the world about defect prevention. (2BT)
- Does certification always, or only sometimes, improve crediblity (2C1)
- increase body of knowledge (2BU)
- can't be used as a replacement for common sense. Certification does not imply common sense. (2BV)
- What is being certified. The people, the architecture, the process (2BW)
- Best Practices (263)
- Best practices are things you choose to do. Policies are something you have to do. Policies do not necessarily imply a best practice. (2BX)
- Move EA from compliance based to value based (29E)
- Need portfolio of best practices that help sell the value of an EA (29F)
- Review, Edit, Validate from Unisys slides (264)
- Need to establish a connection between business needs and the architecture definition (265)
==Notes from the discussion=== (2C3)
- What is the best practice to get beyond the worst practice (266)
- Senior leadership expects solutions to fix underling's problems rather than how they can solve problem themselves. (267)
- How to get senior leadership to participate at the strategic level to work on architecture issues. (268)
- Task orders to work on many problems, all with architectural components, would be much easier to solve the tasks if a good architecture description were in place. (269)
- The absense of documentation of an architecture is problematic. (26A)
- The senior management does not want to review (26B)
- Distinction between an Enterprise Architure and the IT Architecture (26C)
The EA needs to include the strategic plan, business processes, (What do we do. How do we do it.) (26D)
Example: The senior management may have a vision of creating a web based customer centric organization, but has never written that down. (27N)
Few EA teams have senior management buyin. (27O)
How to convince senior management to view EA development as a management tool to help (27P)
OMB's push for EA includes budget cuts which will push organizations to compliance. But will fund organizations to collaborate. (27Q)
It was obvious at our agency that we needed an EA and didn't have one. (27R)
Going to OMB and saying we (27S)
In consolidation workgroup. Indivitual agencies have security concerns over network integration. Despite their concerns they are being forced by OMB's policy to move forward on consolidation. (27T)
Small agencies fall through the cracks at OMB because they don't have time to review them. The management ignored the OMB push for developing an EA. (27U)
Request for adoption of ActiveX in EA. The Technology Review subcommittee refused the request and told them that it would not be allowed. (27V)
If you don't have management that supports the EA then there is no point in engaging in the activity. Money talks. Funding needs to be tied to compliance. (27W)
<hr> (27X)
Need to show how the IT is related to the business of the agencies. (29G)
Key to this is understanding the business needs. (29H)
Don't need CEO to how IT will be done. Need to work with business side to say what they need and how it needs to be provided, and a capability to turn this information into that information.... Need a capability for turning their information into my information. (29I)
Backbone is a big issue. No policies that tell management what they have to do. Those who write the policy refuse to write policies that tell the boss what to do. (29J)
DoD is having trouble tracking documents and are building a federation hub for allowing the 17 systems to talk to each other through the hub. (29K)
Standardization of document tracking numbers as the document flows through agencies. (29L)
Workflows vary between agencies. The IT systems need to support variations in document workflows. (29M)
Who is the subject matter experters. Does the content need to be legally vetted. Do we need to have blackberry's for the group? Why.. (29N)
- Drivers for a government agency's EA include a compliance push and a value added push (2BY)
(27Y)
<hr> (27Z)
- People (24M)