Thoughts Register

Those were the days when we as Architects have to put effort on planning deployment architecture. Usually, in a typical System Architecture Definition document, ‘Physical View’ or ‘Deployment View’ will be one of the 4+ 1 views. Arriving at deployment architecture with the exact no. of infrastructure components like Servers, SANs, routers & switches, networks capable of handling a pre-defined bandwidth etc requires a series of activities that include capacity planning exercise, stress testing, load profiling analysis etc. ‘Application Agility’ is the driver behind many SOA and BPM initiatives. Applications were architected based on Service Oriented Architecture to respond to the changes in business rules or business processes because of market situations & regulatory compliance requirements, But ‘Application Agility’ will not alone provide true agility. Change is not only confined to business process / rules. Another dimension is ‘Volume’. Suddenly there can be a spike in no.

When it comes to embarking a larger initiative in an enterprise, it will not fly high unless it has a good, concrete buy-in from different stakeholders, especially from business. Whatever may be the approach either it is EA or SOA based initiative, business stakeholders should be convinced with proper justifications.  In addition to business metrics oriented reports, if we use models extensively, it will also help in making stakeholders clearly understand what is planned to be achieved through big initiatives. Models also play a vital role in bridging the execution gap between strategy & operational infrastructure. Models will help in ensuring that the strategy that is envisioned is executed; it is transformed in terms of processes & operations. Assessing the maturity of an Enterprise – in terms of business / technology, against the industry standards/benchmarks will be key driver for arriving at a strategy. Usually maturity models are considered to be the representation of s