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September 10, 2003
Enterprise Architecture and City Planning
A useful analogy on enterprise architectures, software architectures, and patterns:
- An enterprise architecture is like city planning
- A software architecture is like a building design
- Design patterns are like codes and best practices in the building trade
The Danish government's white paper on enterprise architecture makes the first analogy in Chapter 4. In it, the work of city planning is divided into three main categories:
- Standardization - dimensioning of pipes, voltage, roadways, etc.
- Certification - regulated and standardized qualifications for workers
- Management - rules, notifications, permits, approvals, etc.
The work in enterprise architecture is largely the same. Most people who have a technical background understand the need for software architecture, but don't quite get the enterprise architecture thing. I think this analogy brings out the need and its relationship to software architecture quite clearly.
The need for a proper enterprise architecture is even more clear when you undertake implementing projects based on a service oriented architecture. Doing your own software architecture for your project does you no good if you can't talk to other services. General standards like SOAP and WSDL help here, but each organization also has much to decide to make SOAs work for them. If interoperability is the goal, then enterprise architecture is the way to get there.
02:56 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Timezones and Phone Meetings
I have a lot of phone meetings and getting the timezone right requires constant vigilance. I had more than one meeting not come off because I or someone else messed up the timezone thing. Now that I'm working with John Gotze from Denmark on some things, its even harder. John clued me into a handy web site though that helps. Using the personal worldclock you can create a personalized collection of clocks showing the time in various cities. Here's one showing Salt Lake and Copenhagen. There's also a meeting planner and a fixed time calculator. Very handy.
09:41 AM | Recommend This | Print This
New Zealand Government Standard on Using RSS
The New Zealand government has published a standard on using RSS to publish "media releases and other event-related content authored by government agencies and intended for public consumption via outlets in various media." These news feeds are collected and made available on New Zealand's website. Here are some highlights:
- The standard calls for using RSS 1.0 and gives a NZ government specific module that adds to the Dublin Core so that government functions can be properly described. Utah's Government Information Locator Service, run by the State Library, provides a similar module for Utah State government and even provides a tool for creating the right metadata.
- The standard provides examples of what properly created RSS feeds ought to look like, but offers little help how to actually create the RSS feed.
- There is a procedure outlined for submitting your RSS feed to the eGovernment office for validation and inclusion in the central RSS aggregator. The central aggregator presents the news feeds on the NZ portal.
I, for one, applaud New Zealand's efforts in this area. Creating standards for things like this is the chief way that eGovernment offices and CIOs can provide for interoperability and help create an enterprise architecture that enables eGovernment. Ideally, such standards are created after a pilot stage where some experimentation and learning has gone on, but before too many people are intrenched in what they're doing.
RSS is an important step for governments to make. Utah has had a central calendar on its web site for years and its a great idea. Yet, because it was created before RSS was much heard of, the interface is proprietary. This has two huge drawbacks: agencies have to do something special, even manual, to insert events into the calendar. Once its in there, the data is useful for that application only and can't easily be repurposed. If the system were to be redone with RSS as its foundation, and the Governor's office, which has started using RSS for its news feeds, were to have agencies standardize how they create and disseminate news released and calendar events so that they automatically created RSS, the system would be more flexible and more widely used.
09:34 AM | Recommend This | Print This
GM's Found Religion on Digital Identity
Tony Scott has interesting problems to work on. As CTO of General Motors, there are lots of things that could occupy his time, but increasingly, he's focusing on digital identity. He gave one of the keynotes at last year's Digital ID World conference and I was fascinated by how similar his problems were at GM to the ones faced by the State of Utah and probably every other large organization. From an identity standpoint, Tony has three huge areas of opportunity, or risk depending on how they're handled:
- Hundreds of thousands of employees,
- One of the largest, mot complex supply chains in the world, and
- A vast distribution network of independent dealers
In a recent interview with Phil Becker, Tony commented on fact the digital identity is central to business strategy:
I end up participating in a lot of external events, forums, discussions, etc. and what's been interesting to me over the last year is the rising barometer around awareness of, and also concern about digital identity. There's hardly a session I go to these days where it doesn't come up in some form - whether you're talking about intrusion detection, who's on our network, who should be on our network, or application strategy. I was with a group yesterday that were talking about "compute on demand" and how you would enable that infrastructure. Not surprisingly the conversation wound around to identity management. It seems to be a very pertinent and rising issue, particularly in corporations. Especially as you go collaborative as GM has, where we do a lot of work with outside partner vendors and suppliers. That is heartening, because without some fundamental understanding of the issue and potential solutions, you can't get very far.
GM is right in the middle of this. Having a good identity system for customers, or at least their vehicles, let's GM dealers know the maintenance history for my Silverado pick-up even though I get it serviced at different locations from time to time. This is very similar to the medical records problem faced by IHC and other large health care providers. In the future, I hope that my vehicle maintenance history will also be available to the independent repair shop I like to use sometimes as well.
Of course, OnStar is one step further along the road of creating strong customer ties to GM and identity is at its core. Says Tony:
I think there is a greater understanding of where this fits architecturally in the whole scheme of things, how central identity is to enabling the infrastructure and applications of a company to really work. A personal story that illustrates this: I was recently at a meeting and rented a car with OnStar service. I was able to give them my OnStar account number while I was in this rental car. Later on, I called back in and they were able to save my route, give me an update on all of the services that I had requested, portable across cars. You could see the power of having an identity that you could transfer. On the same day, the opposite was also demonstrated. I was bumped off [an airline] and moved to [a different carrier.] Even though I have a frequent flyer account with an airline related to the second carrier, that carrier had no clue that I was a frequent flyer for their system.
I'm sure other large companies have clued into the fact that an identity infrastructure and an identity management strategy are key to their relationships with their employees, customers, and partners, but Tony Scott is putting GM's commitment to this idea very much in the public. Tony will be speaking on Thursday at this year's Digital ID World; I'm looking forward to hearing him again.