Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Full disclosure: I’m attending Oracle OpenWorld courtesy of Oracle.

Speakers:

• Mark Salser, Senior VP, Enterprise Solutions Group
• Mark Dickson, Systems Architect, Cochlear Americas
• Edward Screven, Chief Corporate Architect, Oracle
• Paul Cross, Group Vice President: Sales Consulting, Oracle

Quotes from Mark’s intro: “Why has Enterprise Architecture become more important? The issues are moving more toward enterprise level issues … Think about enterprise architecture as a strategy for your business. It is a strategy for how you bring business and IT together and requires a holistic view of the business. … Ultimately you want to create a collection of prescriptive guidance … that takes you down this path of operational excellence.” Five key points on slide: rationalize, standardize, consolidate, optimize, and innovate. “Enterprise Architecture is about establishing the foundation for an optimized IT core.” On the slide, it emphasizes that this foundation is based on architectural principles, best practices and reference architectures, industry and corporate standards, technology trends, and a rationalized IT portfolio, with a business model, strategy, and objectives at the center.

There’s a slide up now that shows a simple view of what they consider to be the core. It has the standard three tier view of user interaction at the top, application services in the middle, and a technology foundation at the bottom. In between the user interaction and the application services layers is a composite business process layer.

After a slight detour for an interview with Edward Screven, Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architecture, they are getting back to a framework (hopefully). They presented some typical guiding principles for EA, and then split EA up into three areas: people, process & framework (architecture development process, EA framework), and portfolio (Oracle Enterprise Architecture Repository, Services and Products).

The Oracle Architecture Development Process looks very TOGAF like, the Oracle Enterprise Architecture Framework consists of business architecture, application architecture, information architecture, and technology architecture, with people, processes, and tools on one vertical and EA governance on the other vertical. Underneath it all is an EA repository.

The EA repository consists of best practice reference architectures and patterns from their own practices and customer practices. They are encouraging us to use this as a jumpstart. They’re showing a number of models from the repository (very quickly, unfortunately), but there’s some very good information there. Unfortunately, I asked if those models are publicly available and they are not. An engagement with EA Professional Services is not required, as there are architects from the team that participate on Oracle Mix, and they can make information from the repository available in direct response to the public discussion. Hopefully, Oracle will see this post and establish a process to publish some of these models via ITN on a regular basis rather than keeping them hidden until requested. While I understand the need to keep a certain amount of intellectual property private in support of a consulting practice, there is still some basic reference architecture information that should be available simply for being an Oracle customer that we can pull ourselves in support of our own EA efforts.

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