Starting an EA Program According to Dr. Kenneth Russell

"The biggest issue for any company starting an EA program is Governance and Communication . . . and you guys [Flashmap Systems] offer a great solution for getting that off of the ground."

-- Dr. Kenneth Russell
Kinetic Strategy Partners

Business Benefits of Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture provides a holistic view that enables business managers to see how and where their own individual needs fit into larger overall organizational objectives.

Without Enterprise Architecture, business managers are forced to work within a very limited context that often leads to stovepiped, or siloed, technology solutions.

Reducing redundancy by leveraging existing capabilities allows business managers to make better informed decisions. This inevitably leads to improved performance through cost-cutting and accelerated delivery of new solutions.

How Flashmap Systems Helps Architects

Most enterprises possess lots of non-integrated information, located in different silos, and collected in various formats such as Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and multiple different databases. My company, Flashmap Systems, sells products that help IT organizations establish, communicate, and enforce IT standards, architectures and strategies.

Architecture That's Not Communicated Does Not Add Value

Flashmap's flagship product, ITatlas, provides a focus for transforming and integrating existing content so that architects can explain what they are trying to do and how are they going to do it. Success, in terms of architecture, begins with communicating the right information to the right people at the right time. This requires simple and easy access to architectural information.

Enterprise architecture's chief purpose is to create a unified, standardized environment of hardware and software systems with tight links to business strategies and goals. IT assets encompass logical resources, such as applications and databases, as well as physical resources, such as processors, storage, and networks. A firm optimizes these assets by developing a map of its IT assets and business processes, and a set of governing principles that support the business strategy and how it can be expressed through IT.

The enterprise architecture blueprint specifies hardware, software, protocol, and interface standards. It also includes a development/deployment plan that describes the projects needed to achieve the architecture's desired target state.

There are many models for developing an enterprise architecture, including the Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), the Zachman Architecture Framework, and the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF). Most frameworks contain four basic domains:

1. Business and/or Process Architecture
2. Information and/or Data Architecture
3. Application and/or System Architecture
4. Infrastructure and/or Technology Architecture

Enterprise Architecture standards and conformance criteria must be clearly communicated. Make sure architecture artifacts aren't so esoteric that no one understands them. The key to successful EA is to keep it simple.

Is This Armageddon?

Any commentary regarding the Middle East is radioactive. Nonetheless, the fundamental question seems to me to boil down to a single question:

Does Israel have the right to exist?

Doesn't the core of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute stem from the desire throughout the Muslim world to eliminate Israel?  Are Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists or are they liberators?

There will never be peace so long as the Middle East crisis is perceived as a "long war" in which victory will be the culmination of a series of unavoidable catastrophes, such as the 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982 wars, plus two intifadahs.

Conventional armies, such as those led by Egypt's Nassar, failed to get rid of Israel. Guerrilla movements, such as Arafat's PLO who invented skyjackings and suicide bombers, failed to get rid of Israel. It's unlikely that terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas -- inspired by the rhetorical threats of Iran's incendiary president Ahmadinejad -- will get rid of Israel by raining rockets down onto Israeli civilians.

As Thomas Friedman says, "There will never be peace until Palestinians start loving their own children more than they hate the Israelis."

So far, Israeli withdrawals and concessions have brought about the opposite of Palestinian moderation. As soon as Israel withdrew from Gaza, making it the first independent Palestinian territory ever, militants began firing rockets from Gaza into Israeli towns.

Why didn't Palestinians make any effort to turn Gaza into a thriving state? Why didn't they create villages out of the settlements the Israeli government forced its settlers to abandon? Why did they fail to begin building schools, roads, and hospitals? Instead, Palestinians elected a radical Islamic Hamas government who chose to interpret Israel's voluntary evacuation not as a gesture of peace but as a victory for their armed struggle. Since then terrorism in Gaza has flourished, weapons imported, militants trained, rockets fired.

It's clear Israel will never negotiate the right of return for some 4 million Palestinian refugees, the descendants of the 700,000 Arabs who fled during the 1948 war. To do so would make Jews a minority in Israel -- the very situation that the United Nations ruled out in deciding the original partition of Palestine.

The Palestinian people must decide if they are willing to settle for an independent state living along side Israel. If they elect, instead, to continue to repudiate negotiated peace, then the question becomes Are we rushing toward Armageddon -- the decisive catastrophic conflict described in the Bible as the scene of a final battle between the forces of good and evil, prophesied to occur at the end of the world?