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Inaugral TRAK Steering Group Meeting Planned

As TRAK gains traction and chuffs its way into the daylight .... [groan]

As a standard for an enterprise architecture framework TRAK is in its forming phase wherein we try to set out the mechanisms to control the releases of the formal documentation and to involve people. The very first part of this is to try and get the TRAK Steering Group established so that it can subsequently co-ordinate proposals made by TRAK Working Groups (remembering that it is being run along the lines [snuck another pun in ] of the Internet Engineering Task Force).

The TRAK Steering Group will be chaired by the UK Department for Transport and the first meeting is to be held on the 29th July 2010 at Great Minster House, London 11:00 to 13:00. The main subject is concerned with getting the necessary governance mechanisms/instruments in place.

Part of this will involve developing a strategy for which an trakmetamodel and trakviewpoints documents that form the logical definition of TRAK.

It is still being worked on and is far from complete but the thought was to try and get it out into the open to promote discussion, attract suggestions in terms of the points it should make and provide some of the reading material for those attending the meeting.

The outline strategy is being worked on.

If anyone has constructive suggestions for what should be in the document now is the time to say so!

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• Risk and Threats - The Common Ground Between Security and Safety? (40% )
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External Links

• Outline TRAK Strategy Document - draft, for discussion
• TRAK Metamodel project on Sourceforge and SG Forum
• TRAK Viewpoints project on Sourceforge and SG Forum

Integrated EA 2010 - Keynote Presentation - John Zachman

Notes taken on the hoof from the Integrated EA 2010 conference at Whitehall in London. 

Enterprise Architecture (EA) isn’t the IT. The IT people might recognise the problem first and have the drafting skills to do EA, but ... 

Abstractions

• bills of materials (why)
• functional specs (how)
• drawings (where)
• operating instructions (who)
• timing diagrams (when)
• design objectives (why)

With primitives.You need to separate the independent variables - increases flexibility. Increased granularity doesn’t produce flexibility only smaller pieces.

Perspectives

• scope boundaries (strategists)
• requirement concepts ( owners)
• design logic (designers)
• plan physics (builders)
• part configurations (implementers)
• product instances ( operators)

Reification involves:

• Identification
• Definition
• Representation
• Specification
• Configuration
• Instantiation

Important to be able to see patterns. Architecture is the set of descriptive representations of a complex objects such that it can be created and forms a baseline for change. Descriptions includes all of the intersections between the abstractions. EA does the same for the enterprise.

Abstractions include

• inventory models
• process models
• geographic models
• work flow models
• cyclical models
• objective models

and the perspectives

• scope boundaries
• business models
• system models
• technology models
• tooling configurations

What?

• Inventory models = bills of materials
• Entity models, data models

How?

• Price models = functional specs
• Transformation models

Where?

• Network models = drawings
• Geographic models, distribution models, geometry

Who?

• Organisation models = operating instructions
• Work flow models

When?

• Timing models = timing diagrams
• Control structures, cyclical models, dynamics models

System models are platform independent - they are logical models and do not contain technology.  Business models are computation independent. Technology models are platform specific - they contain technologies. Tooling configurations are vendor product specific.

“The Zachman Framework is not a methodology.”

“Why would anyone think that the descriptions of an enterprise are going to be different from the descriptions of anything else that humanity has devised? Architecture is architecture. EA is not arbitrary and it is not negotiable.”

“The framework schema is technically an ontology. A framework is a structure.  A structure defines something. (The periodic table is a structure.) It is a closed set. The periodic table provides a definition. A process transforms something. A process based on a ontological structure is repeatable and predictable - a science.”

“more variables means less reuse”. i.e. use relationships to provide context not title/name etc. “architecture is the factoring out of primitive components ... we live in the composite / complex views”

Conclusions
Is there a technical solution to the problems? The enterprise problem is an engineering problem not a technical problem.

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External Links

• Integrated EA website

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