What exactly is "Enterprise Architecture" (EA)? Does it have anything to do with what an architect does when he designs (and helps build) a building? Can a business be "designed," and if so, is that design a role of the business or the information technology team? There seem to be more questions than answers in the EA world, and newer terminology (like Model Driven Architecture, Business Architecture, Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Modeling) seem only to muddle the picture. For the past few years, the Object Management Group (OMG) has focused on delivering standards that help organizations define and organize their structure and processes, while OMG's SOA Consortium is now finalizing a description of what an Enterprise Architect does in its EA2010 project. Dr. Richard Soley, Chairman of both groups, will give an overview of EA, the role of the Enterprise Architect and how the pieces relate, and how they can make a difference in your business.

In IT organizations EA has gone through various cycles of development, just as modeling has! But a new trend is on the way. Our research shows that transition to business architecture (BA) for EA teams is a must and is slowly happening. However existing EA groups struggle to elevate their role to be more business oriented. Why BA, what are the issues, the benefits, the challenges, what are vendors doing, and finally how modeling can play an important role are the key topics of this presentation.

Will discuss the following topics
- MDA and other patterns
- UML and DSLs
- Model Transformations
- The future of UML and related standards

Semantic Interoperability: The Next Model-Driven Integration Challenge

Macro economic trends requiring B2B and A2A integration make data transformations increasingly important. When the MDA initiative was launched early in this decade, its founders predicted that model-driven data transformation would be an important area of growth. This growth has in fact taken place, and has made the process of implementing data transformations faster and less bug-ridden.

The advances of recent years mitigated integration costs, but the costs are still too high, consuming 30-40% of IT budgets. Now it is time to chart the next milestone on the data integration path: improvement in semantic interoperability.

Standards that define common data and message formats contain only one kind of machine-readable metadata, namely metadata about the syntax of the information exchange. Machine-readable syntactic metadata makes it possible for current state-of-the-art data integration tools to generate data transformation code, once the integration analyst has entered a mapping from one format to another into the tool. This represents a genuine advance, since programmers do not have to write the low-level transformation code.

However, regardless of whether machine-readable syntactic metadata is based on EDI, XML, or something else, this metadata does not provide integration tools with a basis to help integration analysts decide *what* the mapping between two formats should be. This is a key reason that the integration work is still so labor intensive. Moreover, misunderstandings about the semantics of data and message definitions lead integration analysts to make subtle errors that can be costly and difficult to track down. Semantic metadata standards help to address these limitations.

This presentation will explain the nature and structure of machine-readable semantic metadata that is now coming on line in standards for the manufacturing and financial services industries and is being increasingly used by ERP systems, opening up possibilities for a new generation of tools that make integration analysts substantially more productive and accurate.

It's time the Business-IT Divide was closed, removed, abolished - and made into history. This session summarizes how things could be in a few year's time, and then briefly describes what's needed to make it come about. We have the know-how; all that's lacking is the will.

Enterprise Architecture is becoming more and more common, but not necessarily more successful. Too often, vague goals of Business-IT alignment and incomplete understanding of architecture roles and processes lead to vague and undefined deliverables. For architecture to be effective at influencing outcomes, it has to be executed within a framework that generates useful artifacts in support of the development process. Furthermore, the output of one phase of the process needs to be the input to the next, otherwise the artifacts quickly become out-of-date. This session presents a case study of the travel industry. Starting with business models, it follows the architecture process through the analysis and design of semantics, business processes, and services with their interfaces, documents and implementation. The case study uses an integrated set of UML models created with Enterprise Architect by Sparx System which leads to the consistent design of services within an enterprise scope, using enterprise semantics, and traceable all the way from business strategy down to the IT services that implement it.

This success story and Blu Age’s customer testimony demonstrates the reality of 100% code generation of a JEE application and the associated learning curve.
The first part of the session is focused on agile MDA and full code generation without having to invest on executable UML and other complex specifications. This will be demonstrated through small use cases:

* Model = code : how to manipulate few high concept elements, yet describe all business logic, data, screen and navigation
* Agile : since source code is only an execution artifact (like bytecode is for java), applications are produced through very short iteration, straight from requirement to testing
* No code ! What non JEE knowledgeable can achieve using MDA technology
* Zoom on business rules modeling and on the merging of MDA and BRMS
* Your model is your application, therefore models are key intellectual assets where is specified both your business and how it is operated. Full MDA generation is the unique opportunity to build a Business Process Asset Repository

The second part is the testimony of a Blu Age’s customer to produce JEE applications with heterogeneous team:
* Description of objectives: cost and time savings, non JEE and/or non IT resources generating 100% of JEE application, learning curve
* Return on experience:
o Learning curve
o Autonomy of people depending of complexity o Type of customer human resources and Blu Age accompaniment

This session will demonstrate how EA Frameworks such as TOGAF9 can be utilized to produce actionable, quick start model based solutions. The presentation will showcase use cases from both commerical banking and government organizations leveraging a robust model management capability.

Areas of focus include both business and IT centric architecture frameworks and how mulitple stakeholder groups can be leveraged in producing and maintaining architecture deliverables which produce value for the organization leveraging models. A case study will be precise on capturing and managing an IT Portfolio leveraging the power of models to enable change and knowledge transfer throughout the organization.