Vice President,
Gartner



Vice President,
Gartner


Enterprise Architecture Special Report: Overview

We are at the end of a generation of work in enterprise architecture. What we need now is a new type of architecture that enables enterprise-to-enterprise collaboration at a level of processing capability that we have never seen before.

What has changed?

Early on, cracks began appearing as applications to support new business requirements were constructed outside the citadel of the IS organization and the back office. In some cases, parallel architectures were created. In many cases, the newest applications - those focused on the frontiers of customer touchpoints, on e-business and on supply chain management - were not reflected in any architecture at all.

The revolution in business models isn't over. If anything, it's "gaining steam." From within, there is pressure to outsource noncore processes through successive bursts of downsizing. The requirement to interoperate within these outsourcing communities has never been greater.

Furthermore, innovative business principles are accelerating the decomposition of the traditional enterprise, and will continue to demand new ways of constructing strategic enterprise architectures. Looking outward beyond the enterprise, value webs are beginning to redefine the boundaries of businesses. Supply and buying chains are eroding classical definitions of a business relationship. This new era of e-business partnerships is fluid, and these partnerships are reconstituted almost "on the fly." Connected enterprises are being built and then dynamically re-formed from the ground up. Globalization and the push for the real-time enterprise "add fuel to the fire." Consider this - with the new enterprise architecture in place, we will see a significant decrease in merger and acquisition activity. Why? Because once we enable the sharing of business and system objects through architecture, buying a business to gain access to its assets will no longer be necessary.

Therefore, monolithic, centralized architectures that focus only within the enterprise, and not on business partners and customers, are worthless. Architectures that only dictate how applications need to look inside, rather than how they interoperate, will not enable an enterprise for business transformation.

Is there a light at the end of the tunnel?

We think so. Newer architectural models put us on a track to make real the loosely coupled enterprise, and push for an increasing capability to collaborate among all kinds of applications - even the oldest styles, such as transaction processing. In fact, we believe that most applications must become collaborative, and will need to have the capability to transform themselves dynamically in response to a changing execution environment.

Perhaps the key message of a new style of architecture is that it needs to concentrate on major interfaces, "black boxing" data and processes to allow dynamic linkage and fluidity. Architecture needs to encourage new levels of information exchange. Our vision extends to a model where an integration platform allows registration of the most dynamic of components, fostering the real-time recombination of applications, using service-oriented linkage concepts, into groupings of components that get reconstituted at runtime. Think of it as a "survival of the fittest" model, where the component that gets dynamically linked is the best. Service architecture standards of dynamic call and active registry allow the choosing of these best-of-breed modules for each application function, substituting others in a dynamic way.

How should enterprise architecture adapt to these changes?

Clearly, the design points of new architectures must be different from the old. Architectures must enable business transformation, rather than stand in the way. Collaboration and interoperability are new goals, and business and technical efficiency needs to be measured in these new terms. A new enterprise architecture needs to concentrate on enabling interoperability not only within, but among, enterprises. Opening multienterprises to collaborative e-business can only be accomplished with a new style of architecture. Back-office architectures must transform to emphasize interbusiness processes, and they need to become more flexible to facilitate more-dynamic opportunities of business recombination. They need to be outward-looking rather than inward-looking.

What can we do to change our focus?

This special report explores the four elements of a new foundation in enterprise architecture:

  • The "grid"
  • Architectural styles that represent key business processes
  • Patterns, which are logical technology models
  • Core technology building blocks, which we call "bricks," that link to the grid
This framework is based on a new business justification that promotes system interoperability, organizational rules, governance and core methodologies.

The notion of the grid has its roots in the trickle-down of the Internet, using its concepts of access, componentization and interoperability for the interconnection of multiple enterprises. It is an interoperability platform. Some of the core components of the grid include the "multienterprise nervous system," a security and availability management system, information and application management, data exchange through XML and its tools, governance rules and development platform methodologies. The multienterprise nervous system manages network traffic, connects, manages, monitors, translates protocols, integrates and does real-time status management - all facilitating dynamic system interconnection among enterprises. It is the smart network all grown up. Our future vision shows the grid becoming more of a living system, by being self-aware and able to self-heal, self-reconstitute and self-manage. Bricks are foundational architectural elements, such as operating systems or databases that link to the grid to provide technology function. These bricks are the basic elements for building systems. They can have varying levels of granularity from specific components, such as gateways to platforms. Think of the grid as providing the "juice" that enables these bricks across enterprises to communicate.

Patterns are groupings of bricks - essentially logical models of technology. The concept of patterns is useful because patterns can be reused and can help create a shared vocabulary around specific design and implementation considerations. Some types of two- and three-tier computing models are examples of patterns. So are hub-and-spoke and message warehouses. The key is to leverage patterns so that they enable cross-enterprise component specification and use. For example, logical extensions to the user interface, business logic and data layers enable departmental, enterprise and cross-enterprise architectures.

Architectural styles, the last of the key elements, bring the business domain into the architecture process. Key business process elements - for example, the need to manage shared inventories, or allow multienterprise postings against a supply database by collaborative-commerce partners - require a different style of computing: a collaborative style in the first, and a transactional style in the second. Think of these styles as templates for viewing how common business processes can be standardized and then devolved into patterns and bricks. We have defined five styles: transaction processing, real time, analytical, collaborative and utility. Each of these business process examples is best-served by a different architectural approach.

From the viewpoint of a methodology for building a multienterprise architecture, we would:

  • Define the fundamental business styles of this domain of architecture (made up of a series of business activities)
  • Categorize these styles of business processes
  • Determine the best reference models or patterns of IT solutions for each style
  • Use these patterns to organize the bricks, all enabled through a base foundation of infrastructure that we call the grid At each level, there must be a series of appropriate needs, principles, processes, guidelines and standards to gain architectural consistency and its corresponding benefits.
At each level, there must be a series of appropriate needs, principles, processes, guidelines and standards to gain architectural consistency and its corresponding benefits.
  • Needs: The critical or core business processes and performance demands
  • Principles: Decisions, values and beliefs, such as single or multiple sourcing strategies, centralization of infrastructure or not, variations on Web-enabled delivery focus points, use of data marts or operational data stores - all to suit the business process performance needs
  • Processes: Laying out the behavior of developers and their use of patterns or reference models to attain the desired consistency and corresponding benefits
  • Grid: The fundamental basis for effective enterprise-to-enterprise communication employing agreed-on sets of "alphabets, vocabularies and grammars" (based on tools such as XML and SOAP) and intelligent network operations
  • Guidelines: The array of practices to follow - represented by patterns, bricks and specific implementations of the grid
  • Standards: Uniform approaches to capabilities both de facto and de jure, such as security or enterprise application integration
Will this dramatic vision happen tomorrow?

Most likely it won't. There are still significant technology and business challenges. Business trust, change management and fear of change are also inhibitors. However, a step-by-step approach to moving forward is key. The tools and techniques of the enterprise architecture we have described can set a course as well as position the enterprise toward a new plateau of competitiveness in this dynamic economy. It is important to set the right direction for the transition now. It is our belief that we are on this road and there is no turning back. It is imperative that we begin.

Bottom Line

Every system must enable key new business opportunities. Systems that don't will make a business noncompetitive and drag it down to the ground. Gartner's new enterprise architecture models provide the processes, tools and methodologies that empower the IS organization to build systems that match business need effectively and economically.