Business Architecture Repository

One of the most important deliveries of business architect is to build the following repository:

• Business Vocabulary Repository
• Business Domain Model Repository
• Business Rule Repository
• Business Process Repository
• Business Event Repository

These repositories should be independent of individual project repository. Business architect should take pieces of business rules, processes and etc. from each project to contribute to the related repository. Each project should in turn take reference from these repositories. This is another instance of the so called “Plan and Harvest” paradigm.

The repositories can be organized by each business segment, for instance, retirement solutions segment, life insurance segment, and group protection segment.

It significantly reduces the power of any documents if they are not readily and easily accessible by every team member, not easily searchable, and don’t allow comments and feedbacks. A very common practice in many IT shops is to write documents in word document and put them in shared drive. This practice has severe limitations.

I will propose to utilize so called Enterprise Social Software such as wiki (I will post another blog, “Enterprise Social Software as an IT Project Platform” soon) to facilitate the celebrative creation and consumption of these repositories.

The Fundamental Enterprise Reference Architecture Blueprint

This Enterprise Reference Architecture Blueprint is meat to break the barriers of and addresses the integration, transactional, operational, analytical, and batch applications in a cohesive manner within the same architecture space, which not many IT shops have ever done.

It is very easy to understand and has low learning curve.

It identifies the most critical and fundamental components and integrate them in clean and standard ways. And yet, it will facilitate the extensibility, which means other components can be plugged to the framework seamlessly.

This is a risky endeavor. It can be either overly simplified or overly complex. And yet, during these years in IT, one project after another in different industry and circumstances, I do find some overlapping architecture themes among them. Some fundamental and yet powerful practices that demand not huge learning curve but some disciplined habits and some training can make huge differences.

The distance between wasting a million or more and saving a million or more in relatively large IT projects is much shorter than most people could have realized, imagined or been willing to admit.

People, especially among non-technical people, like business stakeholders often wonder why IT is so expensive.

What most of projects and IT shops really need are not expensive and fancy software from famous vendors; instead, with some common sense and strong people, who have the right mixture of non-technical and technical skills and some proven practices and disciplines, they will be better than at least 80% of their competitors and yet spend less than at least 15% to even 30% money. These are not empty promises.

Open Source in the Cloud

Open source in the cloud represents future for enterprise computing. The combined power of open source and the cloud computing will serve at least 70% of use cases in the enterprise. The rest will be shared by big vendors like IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft.

Knowledge Sharing and Accumulation

Knowledge sharing and accumulation are among the most important practices to knowledge workers, which IT professionals are part of them.

You often see IT teams stand still after several years: they do the things in the same ways; they have same work habits; they have same mindsets. One of reasons to what have happened is the lack of knowledge sharing and accumulations.

One of the most important tasks of IT leaders is to facilitate and encourage knowledge sharing and accumulation among team members.