IT Architecture For Dummies

Kalani Kirk Hausman, Susan L. Cook

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780470554234
• eBook ISBN: 9780470926918
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Systems Architecture
• Index: Computer Science

A solid introduction to the practices, plans, and skills required for developing a smart system architecture

Information architecture combines IT skills with business skills in order to align the IT structure of an organization with the mission, goals, and objectives of its business. This friendly introduction to IT architecture walks you through the myriad issues and complex decisions that many organizations face when setting up IT systems to work in sync with business procedures.

Veteran IT professional and author Kirk Hausman explains the business value behind IT architecture and provides you with an action plan for implementing IT architecture procedures in an organization. You'll explore the many challenges that organizations face as they attempt to use technology to enhance their business's productivity so that you can gain a solid understanding of the elements that are required to plan and create an architecture that meets specific business goals.

• Defines IT architecture as a blend of IT skills and business skills that focuses on business optimization, business architecture, performance management, and organizational structure
• Uncovers and examines every topic within IT architecture including network, system, data, services, application, and more
• Addresses the challenges that organizations face when attempting to use information technology to enable profitability and business continuity

While companies look to technology more than ever to enhance productivity, you should look to IT Architecture For Dummies for guidance in this field.

Part I

Developing the Architecture

In this part . . .

This part offers a high-level overview of enterprise architecture. If you’re not intimately acquainted with the topic of enterprise architecture, you may find this part particularly helpful. In addition to covering basic concepts, we include guidelines for determining success and preventing failure, establishing proper IT governance and management practices, and using enterprise architecture frameworks.

Chapter 1

Planning for Enterprise Realignment

In This Chapter

Defining the enterprise

Defining success

Preventing failure

Information technology (IT) is everywhere in the business world, and you’d be hard pressed to find a business larger than a sole proprietorship that does not utilize some type of IT. When an IT decision is made, its effect can be felt throughout the organization. Poor decisions, such as those made without consideration of the impact on other elements of the enterprise, can create both immediate and long-term problems.

In this book you focus on enterprise architecture strategies and mechanisms that support both immediate and long-term (three to five years) planning. These strategies are used successfully in all types of enterprises, including small to mid-sized offices, educational institutions, and global commercial enterprises.

Defining an Enterprise

The enterprise is a fluid term encompassing all technologies and tech-related policies that relate to services provided to clients, partners, and customers during operation of the organization. The more the enterprise interconnects elements, the more it becomes like a living organism — growing to meet emerging opportunities; consuming resources for sustenance; and generating piles of outdated, outmoded, or outright broken equipment that must be disposed of carefully. The enterprise requires planning to control its growth into useful areas, guidance to maintain its security and integrity during operation, and leadership to face the myriad personal preferences users will bring to their expectations of service value and function.

The strategies you explore in this book enable the enterprise to be stable but agile, which allows for both continuity of operations and the integration of new technologies.

Finding the Best Solution

There’s no perfect solution, no one-size-fits all strategy for enterprise architecture. As long as the technology meets the requirements, performs efficiently, supports business processes, is cost-effective, and can be supported and maintained, it’s an acceptable solution, perhaps even a good one. There is no “best” technology, only the best technology for your enterprise.

Technology supports business, not the other way around. Technology should support business processes and align with strategic goals of your organization. Your technology choice should not limit your organization’s functionality or future goals.

The strategies you look at in later chapters will help you make the right decisions for your organization, minimize cost, foster long-term planning capabilities, and create a stable and agile enterprise.

Providing Leadership

To be an effective enterprise architect, you must provide leadership for the decision-making process; understand the impact generated by each technology selection; and facilitate communication of strategies, policies, and controls to implementation staff and clients.

An enterprise architect must possess both business alignment and broad technological skills in order to filter through user requirements and separate user preferences (“wants”) from requirements (“needs,”) while also seeing past the technobabble jargon that tech savvy clients and IT staff members often use when dealing with normal mortals.

As an architect, you must identify future technology trends, up-and-coming opportunities, and evolving security requirements to ensure that the current-state enterprise is properly prepared to meet emerging solutions and technologies. If not planned carefully and tested thoroughly, integrating new items like the immensely popular Apple iPad can be catastrophic on enterprise networks.

You must have the strength of vision necessary to stand firm and persuade concerned individuals and key stakeholders that some choices have got to be made from a larger perspective in order to reap the greatest benefits for the organization overall. You must be able to speak comfortably with chief officers and end-users, but also have sufficient technical credentials and understanding to be taken seriously by front-line technical staff members.

The worst thing you can do is present strategies to technical implementers and display a lack of real-world implementation experience, without sufficient updated and personal technical ability to be taken seriously. When lost, respect and support from the IT geeks may be impossible to recover, and the best possible strategies ignored or circumvented as a result. To perform effectively, you are obliged to continually extend your own IT skills through study and training. A purely nontechnical managerial staff member should never attempt to dictate technical policies or strategies because they lack understanding of the complex web of interconnection that forms the modern enterprise network.

The technical lead who fails to keep his skills current rapidly becomes a nontechnical lead due to the rapid evolution of both technologies in use and the manner in which they’re consumed by clients and knowledge workers. As an example, consider an IT architect whose skills were developed prior to the evolution of service-oriented architectural design, cloud computing, virtualization of storage and hardware, VDI implementation, Green IT initiatives, privacy and encryption regulatory mandates, and a myriad of other emergent options. This architect won’t be able to effectively recognize the potential value these technologies can add to the organization’s operations — or understand the limitations, cost, and impact of integrating them into the existing enterprise.

We discuss many of the IT leadership roles that may be present in an enterprise architectural project, together with a review of common IT governance and architectural frameworks, in Chapter 2.

In the Traditio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Introduction
• Part I: Developing the Architecture
• Part II: Defining the Role of IT Architecture
• Part III: Creating an Enterprise Culture
• Part IV: Developing an Extended Network Enterprise
• Part V: Obtaining Value beyond the Basic Enterprise
• Part VI: Protecting the Enterprise
• Part VII: The Part of Tens