eXtreme Enterprise Architecture eXplained - Part 2

by Jeff Tash

XEA -- eXtreme Enterprise Architecture -- is not a total, complete, comprehensive enterprise architectural solution. It doesn’t purport to be. 

XEA does not compete directly against the likes of the Zachman Framework or other alternative comprehensive solutions that implement a full-blown enterprise architecture. Rather, XEA is a complement -- not a competitor -- to the many various enterprise architecture approaches out there. 

In its defense, XEA views itself as being, if nothing else, totally pragmatic. It unabashedly concentrates all of its attention on building a foundation before trying to construct a house. From XEA’s perspective, that’s just plain good common sense. Nevertheless, most alternative methodologies for implementing enterprise architecture focus almost exclusively right from the get-go on bridging the gap between business strategy and technology implementation.

XEA is lower-level than EA. XEA’s more akin to survival and safety while EA is more like self actualization in Maslow’s Needs Hierarchy. 

XEA is about establishing and maintaining an internal technology portfolio, which in and of itself, is only a foundation for a full-blown enterprise architecture (like the Zachman Framework). But XEA does share many of the same core beliefs and root principles as expressed by John Zachman, such as when he writes, “Enterprise Architecture shows the business as it is today, depicts it as it would like to be in the future, and provides a ‘blueprint’ for getting there,” XEA responds, “Right on!” The only difference is that XEA would substitute the phrase “Enterprise Architecture” in the quote above with “Technology Portfolio”.

The purpose of enterprise architecture, according to John Zachman, is to:

• effectively apply basic business principles to the management of IT, and
• align IT priorities with business strategy

XEA asserts that the best way to achieve the full promise of enterprise architecture is to start the process by concentrating your attention on Row 4 of the Zachman Framework -- the next to last row -- the one labeled “Technology Model”. That’s where XEA begins.

XEA, in keeping with its mission, is about practical action. There are four broad steps that need to be followed. 

The first step deals with products -- that “glue“ which serves as the lifeblood for every IT organization. 

It’s imperative that every enterprise manage and coordinate the evaluation and selection of IT products. That information represents the foundation for your technology portfolio. The technology portfolio needs to instruct people throughout your enterprise on which products to use, when, why, where to go to get product information, and who to see for product support. 

The purchase of IT products represents a substantial technology investment for most 21st century companies and government agencies. Each year, every medium-to-large organization expends significant amounts of money both purchasing new IT products and paying maintenance fees for existing ones. I’d be surprised if, over the past several years -- in that period between the Y2K crisis and the dot com bomb -- if during that time IT expenditures weren’t among the largest, if indeed not the largest, capital expenditures your enterprise made. Of course, since then the pendulum has swung back totally in the opposite direction. But, trust me. It’ll swing back again the other way… soon… technology is advancing much too fast, at exponential speed, for the market to ignore its advances for very long. Technology is still unquestionably the best route for achieving competitive advantage in the 21st century.

Unfortunately, management often gets blinded by its own “IT is a cost” mentality. They only see the one-time outlay of cash associated with product acquisition. Realistically, those costs are but a tiny fraction of the full value and expense associated with a product throughout its complete lifecycle.

A smart CIO recognizes that the value of IT resonates within the hearts and minds of the people who use the technology. How and where should management invest in order to more fully leverage those people’s skills and knowledge? That’s the million dollar question.

Once the process of establishing, communicating, and enforcing product standards is set-up and put in place, then the next step in technology portfolio management is to formalize the definition of collections of products. 

A collection is a set of products. 

One common type of collection is a configuration. For instance, imagine a standard departmental server. It includes specific products that are required to be installed and running -- including exact version numbers -- along with a guarantee that the entire suite of products has been tested and proven to be interoperable. Certification of stable platforms is, according to XEA, a CIO-level responsibility.

Another type of collection is a design pattern. A typical example of a design pattern might be a toolkit for constructing a Web-based online reporting application. It would include the complete set of tools a practitioner needs to build an instance of such a class of application. All of the individual products comprising the set will have had to have been certified by internal IT, tested to ensure that all of the products specified by the design pattern indeed do all work together properly, and that all license agreements are fully in force. 

Incidentally, there’s a strong similarity between XEA’s notion of products and collections and object technology’s notion of objects and containers. Like with object containers, XEA collections can themselves contain other collections. 

The third step deals with version control. Every product and every collection undergoes change. There are constantly new products and new versions of existing products being released by vendors. Collections need to undergo a version update whenever a new product is added, an old product removed, or a switch is made to a new version of any of the constituent products.

Finally, the fourth step of XEA deals with process and lifecycle. For example, consider a product under evaluation. The process must ensure that the evaluation activity be completed on time and that the proper channels be notified if not. Another example. Every product selected as a standard must undergo periodic review. It’s mandatory that the process be properly monitored and automated to prevent important tasks from falling through the cracks.

That’s XEA. Four concrete steps:

• products
• collections
• version control
• lifecycle

What’s the final XEA deliverable? A technology portfolio that can serve as the foundation upon which rests the rest of enterprise architecture.