Much has been written about enterprise architecture (EA) and service-oriented architecture (SOA). And success with each is dependent on the other.

Centralizing a corporation was once considered an efficient way to run an enterprise. Decisions and information processing occurred in an orderly, top-down, hierarchical manner.

The ultra-competitive nature of today's business world is driving companies to optimize the processes that impact their financial and operational performance. As a result, many companies are seeking to apply performance-driven management techniques to streamline their day-to-day business operations and facilitate better decisions across the organization.

Business architecture is a key link, perhaps the key link, between the enterprise and technology.

Open source business intelligence (BI) is attractive for a number of reasons, especially a lower initial cost, perceived lower overall cost, simplicity of operation, and adherence to standards. The power and capability of business intelligence is growing, and the capacity to perform sophisticated data analysis with easy-access reporting -- hallmarks of BI -- is increasingly attractive to smaller businesses that do not have the budget to undertake full-scale commercial implementations.

While 2007 looks like another interesting year for enterprise architecture, what will be most important? What are the trends? To answer these questions, this Executive Report assembles a collection of articles from several Cutter Senior Consultants on some of the more important topics.

Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about five exabytes1 of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks. [6]

IT technology

Agent technology is now necessary to reduce costs; to improve efficiency and effectiveness; and to support the requirements of individuals, groups, companies, and universities as they collaborate globally. More importantly, it will enable us to create and support a whole class of IT applications and approaches that we previously could not have developed.

Reference model: A structure which allows the modules and interfaces of a system to be described in a consistent manner. [5]

Reference model: A standard definitive document or conceptual representation of a system or process. [2]

The job of the modern CIO is tough. CIOs face tremendous pressure from their customers along many dimensions; the following are just a few of the many that come to mind:

Everyone wants their infrastructure applications, such as e-mail, to be reliable, easy to use, and always available.

Users of operational systems pressure the CIO to let them select the operational system that they think best meets their discrete needs.

In my role as enterprise architecture (EA) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) consultant, some o

We are witnessing a boom in "social software" -- the next generation of online collaborative environments that leverage the vast wealth of connections in our networks. There is great potential for this type of software to be used in organizational and business contexts, provided collaboration is also well understood as a culture and a philosophy.

It is common knowledge that more than two-thirds of all software projects today do not succeed for a variety of reasons: they are either terminated, become obsolete, exceed time restrictions or budget, or deliver a reduced set of functionality. Ambiguous and incomplete software requirements along with insufficient testing are major contributors to these failures [51].

Everyone in IT is talking about service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Coming out of nowhere, blogs have become commonplace in today's Internet-connected world. Only a few years ago, social media, like blogs, were strictly the province of hard-core geeks. But now, grandmothers, public relations (PR) flacks, and teenagers have joined the digerati, posting their political views, their cookie recipes, and their innermost thoughts on the newest boy band, and sharing these posts with friends, family, and the wide, wide world.

Market mechanisms

SOA is the latest in a series of vendor-driven initiatives that, by being vague about their contents and less than candid about their goals, sow confusion in our industry.

Over the past few years, the value of enterprise architecture (EA) has become preeminent for many companies in their business-wide application integration initiatives. This trend is evident in both government agencies as well as commercial sectors across the global IT industry.

Technology only has value if you can do something with it.

-- Dr. Robert Phaal, Fellow, Cutter Consortium

Within the past decade, continued advances in mobile computing and wireless communications have had a profound impact on individuals, businesses, and society at large. Mobile and mobility have become buzzwords, and many mobile applications, both traditional and entirely new and novel, have been deployed [15, 16].

The Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) is incomplete and evolving. However, it has reached a level of detail and prevalence within the US federal government that agencies are now developing or honing FEA-based enterprise architecture programs, and system development projects include FEA considerations.

Enterprise systems (ES) are being widely adopted by organizations in all types of industry and geographical locations, and there now exists considerable research on the impact of ES implementations on these organizations [6, 7]. The promoted strategic advantage of an ES is that it can integrate business functions into a single system with a shared database, allowing organizations to develop a homogenous enterprise-wide information systems (IS) infrastructure.

In the time-honored tradition of earlier buzzwords such as "dot-com," "Web services," and "business process management," the media and the blogosphere are currently humming with discussion of a phenomenon called "Web 2.0." The implication of this name is that the original Web, "Web 1.0," has somehow become worn out or obsolete, and that it is fast being replaced with a newer, better model.

It has always been the case that as an organization gets bigger and more, diverse it becomes progressively harder for separate groups to communicate with each other. Moreover, as each department's functions become more specialized, a language arises from the specialty that further divides departments. In the past, companies dealt with this through the organizational hierarchy that limited the actual communication that took place between departments.

Innovation

The application of wikis will increasingly infiltrate forward-thinking, mainstream enterprises in the form of applications that will save these companies money and enable them to collaborate, and therefore innovate, in new ways.

Enterprise architecture (EA) has taken on renewed importance in the past few years. Yet this is in contrast to the fact that EA has largely had a history of failure to deliver on promised value. Much of this disappointment can be traced to a lack of alignment with business drivers and requirements. As enterprise architects, it is incumbent upon us to understand and address these failures and to deliver value that aligns with business goals.

In order to achieve truly agile, innovative organizations, a change in our approach to performance management systems is necessary. This Executive Report introduces a new measurement system, the adaptive performance management system (APMS).