Random Thoughts about Random Subjects

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Enterprise Architecture in the Cloud

SaaS, Web 2.0, Cloud Computing and Enterprise 2.0
Those are the buzz words of IT community everywhere in the world, but how they actually affect an organizations Enterprise Architecture?
Obviously there are significant changes to the way we architect the enterprise as we are no longer required to define standards and principles governing individual architecture domains, specially those in the technology landscape, like applications and infrastructure.
The final solutions are becoming more and more sophisticated and out of our reach as the tendency to buy and "rent" vs build increases between organizations. Even when it comes to build, in the cloud world, your bespoke solution sits on top of several proprietary components that - technically - you have no access to their internal architecture.
So how its being reflected in the day to day life of an enterprise architect?
As the cloud's main purpose is to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of collaboration (or better say relationships), a forward thinking enterprise architecture should focus on inter-domain relationships rather than those between the components of an individual domain.
An example of this is SIPOC models that you inter-relate your information entities with your business processes. Though we have been creating such models from good old days, the new paradigm suggests the focus should be shifted to these composite models rather than those primitive ones.

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