Architecting the Enterprise

Serge Thorn

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Top Stories by Serge Thorn

In my previous article I describe the role of the Solution Architect within the TOGAF ADM, mostly acting between phases E to G, with a specific focus on E (Opportunities and Solutions) and F (Migration Planning). This article will cover the role in phase G: Implementation governance. The objective of that phase is to formulate recommendations for each implementation project, and govern and manage an architecture contract covering the overall system implementation and deployment. In companies where the maturity is high, it would be perfectly acceptable to have the Solution Architect acting in the name of the Enterprise Architecture team and coordinate activities during the phase G. TOGAF defines objectives during that phase and each of them may be detailed as follows. ► To formulate recommendations for each implementation project (Source: TOGAF 9) The Solution Architec... (more)

Service Management and Enterprise Architecture

Governance is currently a key topic for many IT functions. Its definition varies, but its key themes are true for all companies: effectiveness, efficiency, and reliability. Business value and risk mitigation are also at its center and represent a significant part of enterprise governance overall. Due to the horizontal nature of IT, where almost everyone in the enterprise uses IT assets to complete their responsibilities, the impact of effective IT governance is quite visible throughout an organization. IT governance defines a structure of relationships, processes, and measurement... (more)

Keep an eye on OneCMDB and the CMDB Federation

OneCMDB Version 2.0 is a real interesting concept and product as this may be one of the first IT Service Management solution developed in an Open Source mode. It will not replace your Service Desk solution but may help companies with limited budget or companies which have a wide diversity of existing catalogs of assets. It is only covering Configuration Management as a process and in some way IT Assets management. For those who are using Nagios, there exist some connectors. This has been initially developed by Lokomo Systems using Java but I’m not sure how does that fit with the ... (more)

TOGAF 9 Migration Planning and Project Portfolio Management

Phase H in TOGAF helps to describe how to create a viable implementation and migration plan in co-operation with the portfolio and project managers. Very often companies already have in place a Project Portfolio Management framework and there may be a need to integrate your enterprise architecture with that. As an example, PMI has introduced a standard for Portfolio Management, and portfolio managers have a resource to help them develop professionally and achieve success for themselves and their enterprise. Within an organization, a portfolio represents a collection of active pro... (more)

Do not invest too much in building your CMDB now!

Interesting enough a few days ago a new version of the CMDB federation Whitepaper has been posted. The list of participants is impressive as we find every key players in ITSM including Microsoft…CA, IBM, BMC, Fujitsu, HP and Microsoft have worked together to propose a standard for federating data from ITIL compliant CMDB repositories. The intention is to submit their achievement to a standard body sometimes this year. For the time being, this is a draft which is reviewed by the main IT Service Management actors. In this current version, there are explanations how to push or pull ... (more)