Natty Gur

When I suggest the idea of mapping the enterprise IT assets, I usually got the answer that it's a waste of time because “IT is simple“

One of the assets that you would expect to find in any enterprise is an inventory of all of the applications developed/bought by the enterprise as well as the cross dependencies between those applications. Although it sounds reasonable most of the enterprises that I saw have some inventory of their applications but nothing (written) about cross relations between applications. Usually each application manager had the map of his application(s) in his head, but you can’t find all the dependencies in one place.

You just entered the meeting room for another meeting. Each one of the people around the table has certain specialization，which  everyone  recognize. The DBA has unique knowledge, the security specialist has unique knowledge, the software architect has unique knowledge and  the network architect has unique knowledge. This unique knowledge makes them expert in a certain domain and that makes management to take in account what they have to say. But, what about you (the enterprise architect), what is the unique knowledge that you're bringing to the table?

When you’re coming to implement SOA for the first time you probably focused on the application and technology aspects, but as you drill deeper and deeper into it you’ll found out that going through SOA is actually changing every aspect that your IT department is working. I personally think that we shouldn’t call it SOA any more, That’s IT 2.0!

One of the most common tasks of IT departments is to move information between different roles in the enterprise and to enable them to view and manipulate the information as well as get insights out of them. Each one of those roles wants the data to be moved using a different vehicle, but dose this mean that you need to create a different solution for each role. Each one of those roles wants to change the vehicle when his environment changed to be able to better work in his new environment. Are you building him a new SUV instead of the previous Hammer that he used?

I wrote an article based on my experience in SOA and fortune 500 firms in the last year:  

I just started new working group around Enterprise Architecture: http://aggreg8.net/blogs/enterprise_architecture/default.aspx. Enterprise architecture, not software/system architecture. My first post is about enterprise architecture definition mainly to focus the working group around enterprise architecture.