Enterprise Architecture Toolkit

I've started working on a toolkit for people who get mixed up in the "jungle" of EA articles on the internet.
Unfortunately its a commercial documents and I can't publish it here, but would like to outline what its offering to the users:
1. Understanding Enterprise Architecture
2. How to make the business case for an EA initiative
3. Prepare an RFP or statement of work for the EA project
4. Make decision about in-sourcing or outsourcing of EA project
5. Checklist to hire an EA consultant
6. How to coordinate an EA project
7. How to evaluate EA artifacts
8. How to establish EA governance structure
9. How to maintain EA relevant and up-to-date

Would be happy to receive your ideas on that.

Me and John Zachman!

I just came back from a fabulous workshop held by John A. Zachman on Enterprise Architecture, have captured a lot of niche ideas for discussion in the weblog, will start posting about them from tomorrow.
By the way this is John Zachman:

Scoping Enterprise Architecture

For those who don't know what enterprise architecture is, this wikipedia article might be a good start.
Looking closer to how enterprise architecture concepts has evolved during past several years, one can realize the whole story was around the scope of an enterprise wide plan.
Take Iranian market for example, it all started with IBM's BSP (Business Systems Planning) method offering by DPI (the Ex-IBM) around 15 years ago. BSP had a comprehensive approach on identifying and designing information systems for an organization; as expected, many of DPIs projects turned into never-lasting dilemmas; customers got frustrated and only small parts of plan got realized into software systems.
The idea yet was so promising that many companies and academic groups started rationalizing the key concept into more practical methods; this practice was generally called IT Master Plan. Interpretation of required figures to collect in an IT Master Plan was so diverse that you could find artifacts of a couple of hundred pages to several thousands coming out of exercise.
It was also an emerging trend toward business process engineering (re-engineering/redesign/refinement) with an intensive look at applications of IT in business consulting firms.
When Dr Shams in Beheshti University introduced Enterprise Architecture and later Dr Rahbar offered a more practical approach toward that in his bid on KWPA IT Strategy (2002) project, EA started to capture attention and the older methods started to fadeout.
Even though EA was trying to address several issues around its precedents, such as long exercise period and lack of direct strategy linkage; we saw several EA projects failing to meet deadlines, addressing the business and IT alignment, and providing a transparent portfolio of IT initiatives to the organization.
Beside some general factors that inhibit every project in Iran such as changes in management structure, improper budgeting, inefficient project management, etc.; there were one common problem with all failed projects: "Unclear Scope".

I'll explain how to identify the scope of an Enterprise Architecture exercise in my next post.

Google Apps and Future of Hosting Companies

100 user accounts, 6GB of mailbox space for each of them, Online calendaring, Document management, Publishing webpages and many more from google apps for free.
I didn't hesitate to move my company accounts to google when I found this out. ofcourse my hosting provider isn't so happy since I freed up a lot of space for our other stuff on the host server, no more upgrades!
Just wondering what hosting companies are going to do after a few years from now; obviously they should face the big boy in the battle.
Recommendation? well beside thinking about another business line, I would suggest them to work on more complex application offerings; business apps such as sugarcrm or vtiger are always demanded by small businesses who doesn't have the skills to get them up and running.