Monday, November 27, 2006

Need of Architecture - Winchester House

INPUT
38 years of construction
147 builders
0 Architects
No architectural blueprints

OUTPUT
65 doors to blank walls
13 staircases abandoned
24 skylights in floors
160 rooms, 950 doors

Above example shows the importance of Architecture in every project

Friday, November 24, 2006

Strategy to solve Performance Issue

Is it possible to solve the all performance issues at any level with same strategy?

Let's outline the strategy -

1. Understand the big picture. Understand flow of information in system.
2. Perform profiling of system. Even you know the most probable reason, still prefer to do profiling. It is not mandatory to use profiling tools. Even sometimes log works out fine.
3. Analyse profiling data. Come up with bottlenecks.
4. Define the strategy to resolve bottlenecks.
5. On the basis of gravity and number of bottlenecks, assign person/team or multiple person/teams on bottlenecks/task.
6. For every task do the baselining of performance statistics.
7. Resolve the task. Most of time try not to change business process. Instead go for network, database and servers tuning. May recommend vertical scaling.
8. Recommend change in business process as long term resolution.
9. Again generate performance statistics. Compare with previous one and be happy.

Friday, November 10, 2006

Why to think just big enough on inception ?

Most or almost all projects/products look limited in scope at inception. Slowly and steadily ground reality becomes clear. And comes the stage when it is required to reanalyze, redesign, refactor and start complete makeover of architecture. In simple words, how to limit the scope, how to define boundaries, how much variations actually need encapsulation, how many indirections really solves some non existent problems. Depends how big one can think. Think Big in pragmatic manner !!

Lucky Blog

Hip Hip Hurray !! First comment from James McGovern. Future looks bright. Thanks a lot. Hope to achieve first mission on dawn of new year'07.

Thursday, November 09, 2006

How to select EA Tool ?

Corporations across the industry are recognizing value of Enterprise Architecture. It provides Enterprise wide streamlining/aligning of Business and IT. It reduces the overall cost of IT in long term. As EA group matures, it needs to handle more and more information on daily basis. At this juncture different EA tools available in markets becomes useful.

As this arena is still not considered mature enough to handle all the requirements of EA teams.

Few hints about selection of EA tools -
1) Identify all the information which is to be managed.
2) Identify stakeholders and users within enterprise
2) Go through market survey done by Gartner, Forrester and IFEAD etc.
3) Interact with vendors to understand the landscape
4) Prepare mapping of EA requirements and features available in EA tool
5) Frameworks and methodologies supported by EA tool
6) Last but not least check cost and vendor support

Above is not extensive list, but good enough to start the search.

Mission and Vision of this Site

Vision (Long term)
As url name suggests - EA Group : A EA community site to collaborate and learn from each other experiences.

Mission (Short term)
1) To get listed on most of Enterprise Architect sites like James McGovern, James Tarbell, Sam Lowe, Brenda Michelson etc
2) Add lot of interesting things, so that it becomes worth visiting it.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

What is Enterprise Architecture ?

Every complex problem is composition of simple problems. Similarly, Enterprise architecture consists of Business, Application, Technology and Information Architectures. Understand one at a time and relationship among them, it will make the big picture clear.
Another way to understand complex problem is try analogy. Consider an application architecture analogous to single building architecture. On the same lines, Enterprise Architecture is analogous to whole city architecture.

Let's start sharing knowledge

Afer years of thinking, finally today is a auspicious day to put my thoughts on paper. What can be better way than to start sharing thoughts with world? Blogs have become a powerful tool to share experiences and to interact with world.

"That man is successful who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who has gained the respect of the intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it; who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had." - Ralph Waldo Emerson