ACKnowledgE Silver Level - Architecture Certification & Knowledge for the Enterprise

The objectives are to:

• Master techniques for representing and analyzing enterprise architectures to more effectively manage complex systems of business processes, organizations, and technologies.
  
• Develop practice experience through applying the architecture knowledge to develop strategic options for decision making and developing IT solution approaches for real-world industry-sponsored problems.
  
• Develop communication and program management skills through making presentations while considering all stakeholder perspectives.
  
• Ability to identify areas of IT innovation and requirements relevant to a particular organization.

Signup details.

What is Enterprise Architecture?

Some widely accepted definitions are:

“Enterprise" is any collection of organizations that has a common set of goals and/or a single bottom line.  In that sense, an enterprise can be a government agency, a whole corporation, a division of a corporation, a single department, or a chain of geographically distant organizations linked together by common ownership.

“Architecture” used in ANSI/IEEE Std 1471-2000 is: “the fundamental organization of a system, embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and the environment, and the principles governing its design and evolution”.

“Architecture description” is a formal description of an information system, organized in a way that supports reasoning about the structural properties of the system. It defines the components or building blocks that make up the overall information system, and provides a plan from which products can be procured, and systems developed, that will work together to implement the overall system. It thus enables you to manage your overall IT investment in a way that meets the needs of your business.

“An architecture framework” is a tool which can be used for developing a broad range of different architectures. It should describe a method for designing an information system in terms of a set of building blocks, and for showing how the building blocks fit together. It should contain a set of tools and provide a common vocabulary. It should also include a list of recommended standards and compliant products that can be used to implement the building blocks.

“The enterprise architecture” thus spans the primary and secondary business processes, the organizations, the assets, and the technology components. 

How is Enterprise Architecture related to ITIL and Six Sigma?

Underlying Business-IT operations is the Enterprise architecture or the ‘product’ that the ITIL ‘processes’ help support.  As a standard best practice, ITIL provides a great starting point; however, it has to be applied to meet the needs of your enterprise architecture.  

Note that ITIL and other related practices address focus on the ‘what’ and not the ‘how’.  At the ‘how’ level the implementations can be very different and related to your enterprise architecture.  The existence of commonly accepted frameworks gives us a conceptual framework for collaborative problem solving.  This allows us to share best practice results.  Without such accepted frameworks, knowledge and software will be no more accessible and reusable than it is today. 

How is the CETI approach unique?

The IT architecture community has long embraced the concept of patterns with its inherent promise of creating widely accepted methods for problem solving and industry benchmarks.  Fundamental to any engineering discipline is a common vocabulary for expressing its concepts, a language for relating them together, and methods for framing trade-offs for decision making.  Patterns help create a language for communicating experience about problems and their solutions.  Furthermore, if the patterns are properly defined, complexity theory tells us a small number can generate widely varying behaviors, substantially increasing re-use and reducing costs. 

CETI researchers are formally codifying the enterprise process, organization, and component interactions to successfully capture patterns that represent the body of knowledge that defines our understanding of good architectures.  We call this Business-IT architecture the ‘adaptive complex enterprise’.  The traceable relationships between the product, process, and organizations that result in business value are being studied – not in isolation, but through practice.   A measurable framework integrating these aspects has been developed. 

Current practice and underlying research issues will be covered in the course sequence.  Successfully completed course credits will apply towards a planned professional master’s degree.  Contact ceti@cse.ohio-state.edu with your interest in this program and to be on the mailing list.