Copyright © 2015 Curt Hill Tools What does an EA team need?

Copyright © 2015 Curt Hill

ToolsWhat does an EA team need?

Introduction

• There are several tools that are required for an EA– All of these are software tools

• An office suite• More powerful than normal graph

and chart producer• The repository

– Most of this presentation deals with this


Office• You know all about this type of suite• It includes at a minimum;

– A word processor– A spreadsheet– A presentation manager

• Every team will need all of these• The average enterprise already has a

license for these– The EA team may need to insist on a

standard for these

• This is usually not part of the budget


Graphs and Charts

• EA documentation does include a number of graphs and charts

• Something stronger than the office suite is usually needed

• There is no need for a specialized EA version

• There are plenty of candidates that are Commercial Off The Shelf packages– Find one everyone likes


Finally

• This takes us to the main event• The EA repository is usually

specialized for this purpose• Typically expensive

– It fulfills a complicated role– There is a small market

• We now consider it in more depth



General Characteristics• Able to store any type of artifact

– Most of these are documents or other printable items

• Easy to store and access items – Otherwise will not be used

• Often an online resource• Internal to the enterprise LAN

– Does not usually need to be publicly available

– If it contains proprietary info this needs to be secured


Audience Participation• It is rumored that for many decades

Coca-Cola’s formula was kept in a safe and only three people knew the combination and had seen it

• Is this kind of document one you want in the repository?

• What is the threshold of secrecy that would keep something out of the repository?

• What should Coke do to ensure the loyalty of the three?


Repository Approaches

• What seems to be most common is to have a database as the backend for the repository– Could be relational or NoSQL

• Must be capable of storing each artifact

• Each artifact is indexed by a categorization based upon the framework

• Two examples occur next


Picture


Zachman Categorization• Has rows and columns• Thus we categorize each entry with

two categories the row name and the column name

• It thus becomes easy to find the documents that exist in any particular cell, any row or any column– The artifact name would also be indexed

• This seems to be the approach of the Living Architecture


EA Cube• It is easy to generalize this to any

framework such as the cube• We retain the row and column

indices but add new ones– Line Of Business name– Security– Standards– Workforce

• In both categorizations the EA team is responsible for setting up the proper indices


The Market• Enterprise Architecture is a

comparatively young discipline– Yet it has caught on

• Now the market is adjusting to fill the void that existed for tools

• There are a number of products that are being marketed

• There are also comparisons of these– Most of these comparisons are products in

their own right– I did find the following graphic


Comparisons


Conclusion

• This has been a brief overview of the repository

• Most of them are a front end attached to a database

• We should expect a continued evolution of this product


Documents

Copyright © 2015 Curt Hill Tools What does an EA team need?