The Open Group SOA Work Group making strides to deepen link between TOGAF and SOA

This guest post comes courtesy of Mats Gejnevall, a global enterprise architect from Capgemini.

By Mats Gejnevall

As an attendee at this week’s Open Group Seattle Conference 2010, I met with an international group of enterprise architecture (EA) thought-leaders including Dave Hornford, the new chair of The Open Group Architecture Forum, Tony Carrato from IBM, Steve Bennett from Oracle and Chris Greenslade from CLARS to enhance the TOGAF practical guide to do service oriented architectures.

In case you’re wondering, the practical guide is a best-practice tool for EA practitioners to speed-up and unify the way the industry creates service oriented architectures (SOA). One item we hope to make clear to the industry is that service orientation is not only about producing some web-services and hoping that will improve the agility and cost structures of the organization.

The evolution to service orientation should be a carefully orchestrated process that includes everything from assessing an enterprise’s ability to change, to identifying the areas that really need service orientation properties, to creating the strategic, segment and capability architectures for those areas and finally, to defining the transition roadmap to implement the SOA strategy.

Our discussions focused on creating a guide that is easy-to-understand and use, but that would also serve as a complete description of how the different phases of TOGAF should be adapted by an enterprise. The result is a user-friendly path through the TOGAF framework with continuous references to the TOGAF content meta-model.

One important issue to always keep in mind is that EA is not about doing low-level IT design . . .

Our work validates the claim that TOGAF is valid for all types of architecture styles, while also proving that there are many “ifs” and “buts” during an organization’s adoption path.

One important issue to always keep in mind is that enterprise architecture (EA) is not about doing low-level IT design, but about creating structures in your organization that fulfill your long-term business goals and ambitions. The low-level design activities will be performed during the actual implementation of the project.

Additionally, we discussed the practical guide’s relationship with other Open Group SOA projects (such as SOA Governance and SOA Reference Architecture) in great detail to ensure that the input from the meta-model objects to these projects were properly included and identified.

The resulting practical guide is due the first part of this year. More information on The Open Group SOA Work Group can be found here: http://www.opengroup.org/projects/soa

This guest post comes courtesy of Mats Gejnevall, a global enterprise architect from Capgemini.