I just moved my blog to www.MikeTheArchitect.com . The RSS should still be the same so if you have linked to my blog through the blogs.msdn.com/MikeWalker address you will need to update your links.

A teammate and I were chatting about search ranking and I was telling him about how I am battling it out (maybe battling out is a bit of an exaggeration) with other Mike Walker’s in the world especially the one from the National Enquirer. 

I am happy to announce I have done it! After many years of being second to Mike Walker from the National Enquirer I have finally moved up to the #1 position, but for how long. I won’t last past the next movie star scandal.

Thanks everyone that have linked to me and subscribed to my blog!

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mike+walker 

Results 1 - 10 of about 17,700,000

There has been some really great announcements coming from Microsoft in terms of Green IT and Sustainability here in recent months. One big one is the Environmental Sustainability Dashboard.

Watch Environmental Sustainability Dashboard Demo

Top down support is coming from Steve Ballmer as today he sent out a corporate responsibility letter to the company outlining all that we are doing in this space. He says,

"Addressing global warming is a responsibility we take very seriously at Microsoft." – Steve Ballmer

You can find the details of this on a new site on Microsoft.com called Innovating to Improve the Planet. there you will find what Microsoft is doing to be Green and help customers be Green.

There are additional activities that are happening at Microsoft to help with this problem. For one, my team. In my team, Lewis Curtis is focusing on Green IT and Virtualization. He has provided insights into this problem a bit:

• Providing insights on his blog, Thoughts from the raised floor
• His contributions to the Architecture Journal 18 focused on Green Computing, Environmentally Sustainable Infrastructure Design
• Predictions on Green IT Trends
• Two upcoming TechEd Presentations entitled:
• Understanding environmental compliance, policy and regulation
• The reality and impact of virtualization

The Software Enabled Earth blog is another great Green IT / Sustainability resource for news and activities from Microsoft.

All the time I get the questions about how to do current state architecture or “as-is” architecture at executive briefings (EBC), at events or through our customers. Recently I was asked about this in regards to an effort a large enterprise that is undergoing an effort to map out what their current architecture. As with many companies large and small, there is a reconciliation of IT assets that are being being collected and hopefully distilled into something meaningful to make decisions off of. This is compounded by the economy that has a tone of “doing more with less” and IT optimization.

With the question of current state architecture, it is both a deep and vast area to cover. As you can see from my choice of the image above (depiction of Christopher Columbus claiming the New World) this is a substantial space to cover.

The reason I say this is that it isn’t as simple as understanding a modeling language or notation and then run out and document your enterprise. Outside of the tooling, architecture standards and technology you must understand some outside forces when performing a current state analysis. Below are a sample (not in order) of aspect you must understand:

1. Deep understanding of the CEO & CIO mission and objectives
2. Deep understanding of mission critical solution areas
3. Deep understanding of the enterprise
4. Deep and vast understanding of the business
5. Vast understanding of your IT landscape
6. Vast understanding of your industry

You maybe wondering, I am an architect why should I care about these? Simply put, you must care because you will have to figure out where to start from. Do you start at the CRM system? How about the mission critical Online Banking System? Or maybe start simple with the FoxPro database applications in a LOB somewhere.

If you are not careful you can get a derive to a current state that is neither understandable or usable as seen from the popular example below:

Having context and purpose before walking into an very nebulous architecture effort such as this very important to your overall success. Metrics being the driver of success here. If you are able to qualify the effort you can get some measures of success out of your effort.

So to be effective at you current state analysis we must tie into the organization priorities through a repeatable framework. This corresponds with a repeatable current state process or methodology that is derived from the mission and strategies of the company all up. A model like shown below.

I often hear of horror stories of companies doing a massive current state analysis that turns into a multi-year project and yielding minimal results. The key here is to be strategic about your current state architecture efforts. The issue is that it is easy to “rat hole” into the classic problem of analysis paralysis.

This is an iterative process of focusing on assets that are the highest to lowest priority. Since the future state of any company and subsequently the IT environment is always in motion, we must be mindful of that this movement will occur and build that movement into our plans. The most effective way to deal with this is to create an iterative process like the one below to effectively perform a current state analysis.

As you can see we are bridging the CEO/IT strategies into account and letting that drive the current state analysis. Effectively we want to focus on the top priorities of the company first and then iterate the process for the next tier of priorities.This solves the problem of the is that the enterprise loosing focus on the assets they should be identifying at the right time.

An example of segmenting tiers is shown below.

Each enterprise will have a slightly different way of looking at this but the process should be similar. The tiers will also be implemented in waves. Meaning that you should perform a current state analysis in digestible chucks. I wouldn’t do more than 10 systems at any one time. This keeps a level of focus and increases the overall success of the effort. The only exception here is that as you move down the tiers you can get away with looking at more solutions at a given wave.

Obviously, when we look at implementing this model there is a great amount of detail that needs to be covered in the people, process and tools but this will give us a common way of thinking about the problem.

Without getting too much into process I will focus on where the industry is at with useful standards or tools that will help execute on a current state analysis. With that lets look at defining architectural models and how to build them.

To determine what a architectural model is or sometimes even just as important what an architecture model is not we need to start with a fundamental architecture taxonomy and ontology. Both of these terms are broad and have deep implications but if we keep it simple and say that an ontology that defines a consistent set of definitions on assets, concepts, abstraction and classifications. Then having a taxonomy will show how these pieces fit together in the context of architectural descriptions. This will help qualify the architectural models in the enterprise.

A good starter resource would be to look at IEEE 1471. I wrote a post about this (Making Sense of Architecture Standards) describing what IEEE 1471 is all about an how it contrasts with other standards. There is also a good article from the Open Group entitled Impact Assessment of IEEE 1471 on TOGAF that contrasts IEEE 1471 with their EA framework.

For more information on IEEE 1471 go to their web site at: http://www.iso-architecture.org/ieee-1471/index.html

There has also been some recent developments in this area as from the framework community. TOGAF 9 has released the start of what looks to be promising in two areas. If this continues to grow from the user community I think it could be very compelling.

1. Taxonomy and Ontology / Metamodel - I reference this in my post TOGAF 9 Release and Impressions where I talk about their metamodels and repository efforts. TOGAF is making strides in this area. Granted there still needs to be more work but it looks as if they are heading in the right direction. What’s positive about this even though it isn’t complete is that there is a ground swelling of support and community that is vested in this. Unlike other architectural standards, this one has a significant community that can help drive the standards forward. The side effect of this is that it becomes the defacto standard based on the shier amount of architects in that community thus having a level of uniformity in the industry when thinking about architectural information models.
2. Modeling and Notation – Now that Archimate is part of TOGAF there is now cohesion between the metamodel and the actual model with an architecture markup description language (ADML) and modeling notations.

Even though frameworks provide a lot of value be careful not to loose sight of the objectives. It is easy to do. Also, you may want to borrow from multiple frameworks as there are aspects of each that are unique in it’s own way. For example, Zachman provides a great way to group and classify information but you could use another framework like TOGAF to introduce decision making process to that, likewise with all the other frameworks.

All in all, a very exciting time for architects. There is a lot of new developments and opportunity to further the industry.

Other related posts that I have made externally on my blog that may help you out are listed below as well:

• Making Sense of Architecture Standards
• Pragmatic Approach to Describing Solution Architectures
• What is an Architecture Style?
• ArchiMate - The Emerging Architecture Modeling Standard?
• Architecture Modeling - IEEE 1471 has been adopted by ISO
• Can you Easily Compare EA Frameworks?
• TOGAF 9 Release and Impressions
• Creating a Enterprise Asset Roadmap Strategy
• Do Office Tools Still Play a Role in Architecture Design?
• Enterprise Architecture Analogy
• Obtaining Enterprise Architecture Metrics - Part 1
• Obtaining Enterprise Architecture Metrics - Part 2

There is also a Enterprise Architecture Toolkit that was developed that aid with some aspects of this:

• The Enterprise Architecture Toolkit
• Using the EATK to Capture Architecture Descriptions
• Japan's Largest Publisher talks about the Enterprise Architecture Toolkit (EATK)
• Why doesn't Microsoft have any EA Tools

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Below is the video, Barry makes some very interesting points and I agree with them in an ideal world. But where this all falls apart is when you are the only ethical person in the organization. This is an all or nothing concept, unfortunately I think most corporate cultures are ready for this.

I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine that resulted in some disagreements on root issues architects face. The topic of the Architect Nemesis came up. Where some of assertions were accurate it was still founded on a fundamental belief the we should correlate software architecture to the architecture of structures.

So what is the REAL Nemesis of Architecture?

Is it the engineer? Is it the templates and patterns? The CIO? NO…

I believe that the real nemesis of architecture here is in the name itself. Unfortunately we as an IT industry continue to compare ourselves with traditional architecture. Why is that? Well I think because it looks viable on the surface.

Here is why I think the Structural Architecture is different and why we shouldn’t compare the two (at least without having an understanding of where the analogy breaks down):

1. Maturity – traditional architecture has a head start of approx. 10,000 years old starting with Neolithic architecture that was around before 8000 BC. Since architecture has been around for such a long time there are clear lessons learned. A clear collection of knowledge, true repeatability and reuse, standardization and the creation of architectural styles.
2. History of Architecture – It is unfair to compare software architecture history to traditional architecture history. Contrasting with eras such as Classical –> Medieval –> Renaissance –> Modern architecture is looked at as a linear progression while it is far from a linear progression. As an example, before the fall of Rome there was running water and toilets in homes while it took close to 2,000 years to get that back. Another example is in South America where archeologists found ruminants of Nickel being created where that same feat wasn’t accomplished till the early 10th century. The history of architecture is a complex one driven by many forces and sometimes the great innovations are lost though time. The history of IT architecture is but a fraction compared to the architecture of structures.
3. Motives and Intent– The great architecture that are typically referenced in software architecture are by the Romans, the Greeks and occasionally the Egyptians. The problem with this is that the drivers to build these great architectures where often not the same drivers as for software architectures. These great architectures of ancient times were built based on personal ego, religion and conquest. Examples of this include: Via Appia roads in Rome (support conquest), Pantheon in Rome (ego/religious), Taj Mahal in India (religious), and Parthenon in Athens (religious). For software architecture the primary drivers are business drivers. Not how to sustain a legacy of an emperor or have a religious structure symbolize an ideology but to solve a set of problems for a particular point in time. Solutions are put into a portfolio because we know they will change (sometime radically).
4. Accountability Inherent – Building architects are accountable for there work when their specification fail while software architects are not. An example of this is the case of an architect stealing a design for the Freedom Tower or the example of MIT that sued well known architect for defective structures. There is clear accountability whereas I still haven’t heard of someone getting sued for copy & paste…
5. Models are Concrete – No ambiguity in a model from a building architect. Like the quote from George Box “all models are wrong, but some are useful”.  This resonates and is very true in the software industry. It is very common to see an outdated and obsolete model hanging outside a cubical that isn’t fully understood by the IT staff supporting. While you will never find an inaccurate city planner model. Two different worlds on what is acceptable from the models.
6. Accreditation and Certification -  Unlike the software architecture field, architects must be certified to work on an architectural project. This is vastly different in the software world. Often times the title of architect is given as a promotion to an engineer, a trendy title or just lack of understanding of what an architect really is. This leads to a level of ambiguity in the definition of what really is a software architect.

These are some initial points on the differences of these two vastly different professions. While they look relatively similar on paper they are different. Time and time again I see the correlation between these two professions and keep seeing the inaccuracies and false comparisons which I think leads to confusion and mistrust of our business leaders.

While I have been guilty of making these references when trying to convey ideas with something relatively similar. You maybe wondering if there are other parallels we can reference as software architects, I am not sure. How about the profession of an artist? Software architecture is more art than science, right? At least for now…

What are your thoughts?

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Last week Sohel Aziz’s Enterprise Architecture (EA) team at Infosys released there annual EA survey from their very large customer base. You can download the comprehensive report of the EA survey from their Enterprise Architecture Services portal.

Also if you have a chance check out their EA Blog. There is some really good information there from Sohel’s team which includes: Sohel, Andrew Manning, Sohrab Kakalia, and Thomas Obitz.

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There is more big news on the Open Group front these days with the just announced a merger with the Global Enterprise Architecture Organization (GEAO) that will affect the worldwide Enterprise Architecture (EA) professional community.

The union between the Association of Open Group Enterprise Architects (AOGEA) and the GEAO forms the largest professional body for Enterprise Architects in the world, serving more than 9,000 members in 72 different countries. Please see the below press release for further details. 

According to various Forrester research reports on Enterprise Architecture  there is growing acknowledgment and interest in EA and its ability to assist business leaders in making critical business decisions that align an organization’s business and technology strategies. Given the growing awareness of the EA profession and the role it plays relative to IT and business, the merger between The Association of Open Group Enterprise Architects (AOGEA) and the Global Enterprise Architecture Organization (GEAO) is expected to have a great impact on global businesses and the EA professional community--bringing increased job opportunities through expanded certification programs (TOGAF and ITAC), ongoing advocacy and education services, and peer networking opportunities at local chapter meetings and international events.

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As some of you may know I aided with the Application Architecture Guide 2.0 materials which will soon be a blue book this upcoming year. J.D. Meier who was the brains and the mass orchestrator of the guide has put together a great compile of his works over the past few years. Check it out.

Guides

• Application Architecture Guide 2.0 (CodePlex)
• Building Secure ASP.NET Applications
• Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability
• Improving Web Application Security: Threats and Countermeasures
• Improving Web Services Security: Scenarios and Implementation Guidance for WCF
• Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications
• Security Engineering Explained
• Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server

Performance

Books / Guides

• Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability
• Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications

Methods

• Agile Performance Testing
• Load Testing
• Measuring Performance
• Modeling Application Usage
• Performance Code Inspection
• Performance Design Inspection
• Performance Engineering
• Performance Modeling
• Performance Test Reporting
• Performance Testing
• Stress Testing
• Tuning Performance

Guidelines

• Performance Design Guidelines
• .NET Framework Performance Guidelines
• .NET Interop Performance Guidelines
• ADO.NET Performance Guidelines
• ASP.NET Performance Guidelines
• Remoting Performance Guidelines
• Web Application Performance Design Guidelines
• Web Services Performance Guidelines
• XML Performance Guidelines

Checklists

• Performance Design Checklist
• .NET Framework Performance Checklist
• ADO.NET Performance Checklist
• ASP.NET Performance Checklist
• Enterprise Services Performance Checklist
• Interop Performance Checklist
• Remoting Performance Checklist
• SQL Server Performance Checklist
• Web Services Performance Checklist
• XML Performance Checklist Checklist

Practices at a Glance

• Performance Practices at a Glance

How Tos

• How To - Optimize SQL Indexes
• How To - Optimize SQL Queries
• How To - Page Records in .NET Applications
• How To Performance Capacity Planning for .NET Applications
• How To - Submit and Poll for Long-Running Tasks
• How To - Use Custom Performance Counters from ASP.NET

Security

Guides

• Building Secure ASP.NET Applications
• Improving Web Application Security: Threats and Countermeasures
• Security Engineering

Methods

• Security Code Inspection
• Security Deployment Inspection
• Security Design Inspection
• Threat Modeling

Threats and Countermeasures

• Threats and Countermeasures for Web Applications
• Threats and Countermeasures for Web Services

Cheat Sheets

• Web Application Security Frame
• Web Services Security Frame
• Web Services Security Patterns

Guidelines

• .NET Framework Security Guidelines
• ADO.NET Security Guidelines
• ASP.NET Security Guidelines
• WCF Security Guidelines
• Web Application Security Design Guidelines
• Web Services Security Design Guidelines

Checklists

• .NET Framework Security Checklist
• ADO.NET Security Checklist
• ASP.NET Security Checklist
• WCF Security Checklist

Practices at a Glance

• .NET Framework Security Practices at a Glance
• ASP.NET Security Practices at a Glance
• WCF Security Practices at a Glance

Questions and Answers

• ASP.NET Security Questions and Answers
• WCF Security Questions and Answers

Explained

• ASP.NET Forms Authentication Explained
• ASP.NET Windows Authentication Explained

Application Scenarios

• WCF Intranet Scenario - Web to Remote WCF Using Transport Security (Original Caller, TCP)
• WCF Intranet scenario - Web to Remote WCF Using Transport Security (Trusted Subsystem, HTTP)
• WCF Intranet Scenario - Web to Remote WCF Using Transport Security (Trusted Subsystem, TCP)
• WCF Intranet Scenario - Windows Forms to Remote WCF Using Transport Security (Original Caller, TCP)
• WCF Internet Scenario - WCF and ASMX Client to Remote WCF Using Transport Security (Original Caller, HTTP)
• WCF Internet Scenario - Web to Remote WCF Using Transport Security (Trusted Subsystem, TCP)
• WCF Internet Scenario - Windows Forms Client to Remote WCF Using Message Security (Original Caller, HTTP)
• ASP.NET Intranet Scenarios
• ASP.NET Extranet Scenarios
• ASP.NET Internet Scenarios

ASP.NET Security How Tos

• How To - Connect to SQL Server Using SQL Authentication in ASP.NET
• How To - Connect to SQL Server Using Windows Authentication in ASP.NET
• How To - Create a Service Account for ASP.NET Applications
• How To - Improve Security When Hosting Multiple Applications
• How To - Instrument ASP.NET Applications for Security
• How To - Prevent Cross-Site Scripting in ASP.NET
• How To - Protect Forms Authentication in ASP.NET
• How To - Protect from Injection Attacks in ASP.NET
• How To - Project from SQL Injection Attacks in ASP.NET
• How To - Use ADAM for Roles in ASP.NET
• How To - Use Authorization Manager (AzMan) in ASP.NET
• How To - Use Forms Authentication with Active Directory in ASP.NET
• How To - Use Forms Authentication with Active Directory in Multiple Domains
• How To - Use Forms Authentication with SQL Server in ASP.NET
• How To - Use Health Monitoring in ASP.NET
• How To - Use Impersonation and Delegation in ASP.NET
• How To - Use Protocol Transition and Constrained Delegation in ASP.NET
• How To - Use Regular Expressions to Constrain Input in ASP.NET
• How To - Use the Network Services Account to Access Resources in ASP.NET
• How To - Use Role Manager in ASP.NET
• How To - Use Windows Authentication in ASP.NET 2.0

WCF Security How Tos

• How to: Audit and Log Security Events in WCF Calling from Windows Forms
• How to: Create and Install Temporary Certificates in WCF for Message Security During Development
• How to: Create and Install Temporary Certificates in WCF for Transport Security During
  Development
• How to: Create and Install Temporary Client Certificates in WCF During Development
• How to: Host WCF in a Windows Service Using TCP
• How to: Impersonate the Original Caller in WCF Calling from a Web Application
• How to: Impersonate the Original Caller in WCF Calling from Windows Forms
• How to: Perform Input Validation in WCF
• How to: Perform Message Validation with Schema Validation in WCF
• How to: Use basicHttpBinding with Windows Authentication and TransportCredentialOnly in WCF from Windows Forms
• How to: Use Certificate Authentication and Message Security in WCF Calling from Windows Forms
• How to: Use Certificate Authentication and Transport Security in WCF Calling from Windows Forms
• How to: Use Delegation for Flowing the Original Caller Credentials to the Back End in WCF Calling from Windows Forms
• How to: Use Health Monitoring to Instrument a WCF Service for Security
• How to: Use netTcpBinding with Windows Authentication and Message Security in WCF from Windows Forms
• How to: Use netTcpBinding with Windows Authentication and Transport Security in WCF from Windows Forms
• How to: Use Protocol Transition for Impersonating and Delegating the Original Caller in WCF
• How to: Use the SQL Server Role Provider with Username Authentication in WCF Calling from Windows Forms
• How to: Use the SQL Server Role Provider with Windows Authentication in WCF Calling from Windows Forms
• How to: Use Username Authentication with the SQL Server Membership Provider and Message Security in WCF Calling from Windows Forms
• How to: Use Username Authentication with Transport Security in WCF Calling from Windows Forms
• How to: Use wsHttpBinding with Username Authentication and TransportWithMessageCredential in WCF Calling from Windows Forms
• How to: Use wsHttpBinding with Windows Authentication and Message Security in WCF Calling from Windows Forms
• How to: Use wsHttpBinding with Windows Authentication and Transport Security in WCF Calling from Windows Forms

Visual Studio Team System

Guides

• Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server

Guidelines

• Team Build Guidelines
• Source Control Guidelines
• Reporting Guidelines
• Project Management Guidelines

Practices at a Glance

• Team Build Practices at a Glance
• Source Control Practices at a Glance
• Reporting Practices at a Glance
• Project Management Practices at a Glance

Questions and Answers

• Source Control Practices at a Glance

How Tos

• How To: Add a New Developer to Your Project in Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server
• How To: Automatically Run Code Analysis with Team Build in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
• How To: Create a Custom Report for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
• How To: Create a “Risk over Time” Report for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
• How To: Create Custom Check-in Policies in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
• How To: Create Your Source Tree in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
• How To: Customize a Process Template in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
• How To: Customize a Report in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
• How To: Manage Projects in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
• How To: Migrate Source Code to Team Foundation Server from Visual Source Safe
• How To: Perform a Baseless Merge in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
• How To: Set Up a Continuous Integration Build in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
• How To: Set Up a Scheduled Build in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
• How To: Structure ASP.NET Applications in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
• How To: Structure Windows Applications in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
• How To: Structure Your Source Control Folders in Team Foundation Server

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Mike Kavis posted a high level cheat sheet for the Extended Enterprise Architecture Framework (E2AF) on his blog today. Here is the description from his post:

I Basically took all of the topics from the E2AF matrix and built a document with bullets representing each topic. It is organized by the six key questions (Why, With Who, What, How, With What, and When) and has sub categories for each question by the four different view points (Business, Information, Information Systems, Technology Infrastructure). In Appendix A, I included several links to the website where the E2AF information can be found.  Appendix B lists all of the E2AF deliverables.

I am really happy to see Mike Kavis is making this framework more actionable. As you could probably tell from my comments from TOGAF, I see that one of the biggest issues with these frameworks is the execution angle. In general, the template that was posted could be applied to other frameworks or even homegrown efforts as well.

My only critique would be that while the template provided by Mike definitely has all the placeholders and high level areas that are needed to be addressed it will still take some time for folks to digest all the data that needs to go in those placeholders. I would suggest putting more detail around the information that needs to be gathered in each section to help new people to E2AF or any other EA discipline understand what kind of data goes into each section. Either way it’s still a great free template to use as one of the tools in your EA Toolbox.

You can download the document here as a zipped file from his post.

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