Agile top down
The agile top down approach enable an enterprise to establish their common foundation rapidly in time for practical need without waiting for the traditional waterfall analysis. It is accomplished by align IT to business based on the lines of business in the enterprise.Agile top down approach is based on the concept of pattern adoption instead of pattern recognition. It suggests to establish the common foundation via pattern adoption from the established patterns the same lines of business.
John Zachman's has suggested that
" Based on the Framework for Enterprise Architecture, I would suggest that Enterprise Architecture is the set of primitive, descriptive artifacts that constitute the knowledge infrastructure of the Enterprise. ?Reuse or interoperabitliy does not happen by accident. It is the result of engineering " [15]
Enterprise Architecture have devoted to the engineering of reuse since its inception. Standardization using technical reference model has been the first step in the engineering of reuse, traditional EA approach such as the popular Enterprise Architecture Planning (EAP) approach establish the common foundation based on the waterfall concept to conduct pattern recognition. IBM have introduced the patterns for e-business to establish common business solution as describe in the following paragraphs.
Technical reference models (TRM) have been the most popular reference model to convey technology standard profiles to the stakeholders. The stakeholders of enterprise architecture need to know what is the standard profiles and where are the share resources before they can complying to the standards and access to the share resources. As the industry tend of services oriented architecture, the reference models have also evolved to incorporate the service reference model, the data reference models.
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Abstract of learning experience of others
Human have the unique capbility to learn experience of others but it is also human nature in decline to learn exeprience of others. EA is the discipline to learn experience of the other. The principle to learn expereince from the others consist of :Nothing new under the sun
Learn experiences from the same line of business
Learn the common building blocks instead of entire solution
Learn the right experience using reference model
Buy experience of the others
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Learn the building blocks instead of complete solution
EA can establish the common foundation and building block from the same line of business instead of relies on waterfall solution to derive the common element in a stovepipe approach. There is nothing new under the sky, instead of reinventing the wheel in a stovepipe and water fall solution, Enterprise Architecture is the effort to learn experiences from the same line of business. Although every business are unique, the same line of business shares significant amout of common building blocks.
2.1 The uniqueness is superficial
2.2 The underline is nothing new
Learn the common building blocks instead of the complete solution
Learn the experience is different from buying the Comercial off the shelf (COTS) product or a turn key solution. LEA suggest to acquire the common building blocks from the same line of business and allow the stakeholders to customize the solution based on thier need.
“There is nothing new under the sun” as bible said, it is particularly true in the area of common foundation and building blocks. The notion of “There is nothing new under the sun” is that whatever your changes are, it is very unlikely that it is first challenge of this type in the human history, there must be someone else have the similar challenge before. Therefore, It is much easier to overcome the challenge by learning from similar experience instead of take on the challenge as if no one else have done it before.
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Reference Architecture
From Wikipedia: "A reference architecture provides a proven template solution for an architecture for a particular domain. It also provides a common vocabulary with which to discuss implementations, often with the aim to stress commonality.A reference architecture often consists of a list of functions and some indication of their interfaces (or APIs) and interactions with each other and with functions located outside of the scope of the reference architecture." 2/2/08
From the IBM Rational Edge: "A reference architecture is a resource containing a consistent set of architectural best practices for use by all the teams in your organization."
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