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It has been one year since we launched Essential.  We are delighted with the success of the project to date and thought we would share some of our successes with you, our Community.

To date there have been almost 3,000 downloads of the tool, with a steady monthly rate of approximately 240 downloads per month!  We released an update pack in November, which has been downloaded over 250 times, so we know that some, but not all of you, are keeping track of the updates.  The website receives over 2,500 visits each month, and approximately 600 of these are active users, those that visit on a regular basis.  We take this to mean that we have approximately 600 organisations that are using Essential Architecture Manager as their tool of choice, which we think is a real endorsement of not only the tool, but our free, open source approach.

Hopefully you will be aware that we have not been idle in our first year, and, at the request of you, the community, we have issued five updates via the ECP (Essential Community Process).  Most of these support modelling in the Business Layer, which gives us an indication of where most use is being made of Essential:-

• ECP1 – Capturing License Models
• ECP2 – Capturing Organisation Policy and Compliance
• ECP3 – Links to External References
• ECP4 – Strategy Management
• ECP5 – Skills Modelling in the Business Layer

In addition to the ECP’s, we released a number of updates to make Essential easier to use, some initiated by us and some, again, by you the community:-

• Essential Installer – a wizard based installer that simplifies the installation process, performing all the unpacking and installation of the Essential Project software components for both stand-alone and multi-user installations
• Essential Integration Tab - an easy to use means of providing source-data import and integration capabilities.
• Graphical Models in Reports – version 1.3 included snapshots of the graphical models defined in the Protégé modelling environment to be published to the Essential Viewer
• Demo Video
• Sample Repositories
• Pictorial Representation of the Meta Model

Another exciting development for us was receiving our first contributions from the Community; a Visio Export Tool, Import Scripts and an Enhancement to the Essential Viewer.  We hope that these will be the start of many more contributions over the next year as input from the Community grows.  And on a related note, it’s exciting to see that members of the Community have created and are sharing a patch for Protégé to make it work with Oracle as the database backend.

We are delighted that, after just one year, Essential appears to be making a real contribution to the life of many Enterprise Architects in many organisations, from large global corporations, government agencies and education establishments to smaller local companies, as evidenced by discussions on the forums and direct communications we have received.

Our aim for the next year is to continue to grow the Essential Project Community, to encourage you, the community members, to actively participate in discussions and debates surrounding the tool and Enterprise Architecture in general, and to enhance Essential Architecture Manager driven by your needs.

If you feel you have anything to contribute, be it software for the tool, advice about your use of Essential, successes and failures or information regarding EA in general, please make these available to all in the Community via the forums or blogs.

Many organisations embarking on EA modelling already have a wealth of information in a variety of disparate forms, such as presentations, drawing tools and most commonly in spreadsheets. Rather than re-key, or re-model all this work, shouldn’t we be able to exploit this existing information - lifting it directly - by importing it into Essential Architecture Manager?

Over the last few years, we have explored a variety of options for importing existing information into Protege (and therefore Essential Architecture Manager) and we realised that the only safe and reliable approach was to do this using the Protege API to add, remove and update information in the knowledge base in effectively the same was as the graphical user interface and let Protege take care of all the integrity issues as it does when you work with the forms. Using the Protege API is at the heart of the Essential integration tools.

The new Essential Integration tab plugin for Protege and Essential Architecture Manager simplifying the one-off ‘data load’ of things like your spreadsheets but also the on-going synchronisation of important data that is maintained in other systems. We’ve had some very good experience of doing this sort of synchronisation with configuration management databases and virtual server environment configurations.

This new tab is an evolution of the ’skunk-works’ release of the Integration Server. We have made it into a tab to make it easier for both stand-alone and multi-user use (both modes are supported) and to make it easier to install and add this capability to your Essential Architecture Manager. The process of running an import or synchronisation is now much simpler than it was with the Integration Server.

The concept of the integration server will remain but will be re-worked to provide a means of automating imports and on-going synchronisations from other sources, e.g. on a scheduled daily basis. However, the new integration tab will be the most commonly used mechanism for importing information into Essential en-masse.

Getting information out of Essential to share with other systems is simply a matter of creating a suitable view for Essential Viewer, maybe an XML document or a CSV etc. With the contribution from Essential Project Community member, Mathwizard, this can be saved directly as an export file from Essential Viewer, using your browser.

So how to do you go about importing your spreadsheets, XML documents etc. using the integration tab?

As you might expect, XML is the ideal format for integrating the source information and the integration tab expects source data to be in XML format, so it is often easiest to work with an XML export of your source information.

The first step is to work out how this existing information will be represented in Essential. Unfortunately, there is no magic solution to this. You need to define how your source information maps to the Essential Meta Model and with this understanding define the transform that is required.

By the way, creating relationships and relationship classes during imports can be particularly tricky as the source information often does not represent the relationships in a way that can be mapped to the relationships in the Essential Meta Model. In many cases, it can be best to focus on importing the instances and then completing the relationships in Protege via the forms.

There are two approaches to defining the transform that I’ll explore in a moment. We intend to produce and share a library of transforms from common source formats into the baseline Essential Meta Model.

Currently, we have a transform for importing the XML representation of an Essential repository that Essential Viewer uses. This means that you can import elements from other Essential repositories, out of the box. Also, our previous experience with certain configuration management databases and virtual server environments mean that we can easily share transforms to import Technology Nodes and Technology Instances into Essential.

The two approaches to transforming your existing source information into the Essential Meta Model are:

1. Transform you existing source to XML using the Essential Viewer XML schema. Then import this resulting XML into Essential using the out-of-the-box Essential Repository transform. This approach is useful for once-off data loads from existing sources such as spreadsheets where it’s most important to get the main instances into Essential rather than complex relationships.
2. Define your own transform file and use this to have the integration tab transform your source information and import it into Essential. Although this may seem to be a more complex exercise than approach 1, you have more flexibility in defining how your source information maps to the Essential Meta Model. A how-to guide for writing transforms is being written at the moment that explains how the transforms work and the supporting tools that are available, e.g. a library of script functions that wrap the Protege API to support things like on-going synchronisation of instances in Essential with instances in other, external repositories.

We would be very happy to help anyone who needs to construct their own custom transform via the forums or even to undertake commissions to build custom transforms as required.

And of course, if you’ve built some transforms that you’d like to share with the Community, we would really like to add these to the Share area of the site.

Happy exploiting of your existing information!

We have been struck recently by the volume of articles and blogs regarding Business Capability modelling, many seemingly of the view that this is a new concept that will resolve the old business IT alignment issue.

Whilst we don’t concur with the view that the concept of business capabilities is either new or capable of resolving the alignment issue alone, we are in agreement that business capability modelling is a key aspect of the business architecture.

We view business capabilities as the ‘services’ that the business offers or requires.  In Essential, these capabilities are modelled in the Business Conceptual layer and represent what the business does (or needs to do) in order to fulfil its objectives and responsibilities.

A business capability is at a higher level than a business process.  It represents a conceptual service that a group of processes and people, supported by the relevant application, information and underlying technology, will perform.  The capability represents the what, whereas the process, people and technology represent the how.  Business Capabilities can themselves be broken down into supporting capabilities, if this is useful.

Defining your business capabilities is extremely useful as it allows you to take a step back and focus on the key elements of your organisation.  You can avoid getting bogged down in the details of ‘how’ things happen and concentrate on ‘what’ does (or needs to) happen.  Once you have done this it is possible to identify your key capabilities, for example, the ones that will differentiate your business and you can use this information to ensure that you focus on the areas of importance in your business, whether this is in defining new projects or ensuring business as usual delivers appropriately.

You will find that your business capabilities are relatively static because you are defining the ‘what’ which rarely changes whereas, for example, your business processes will constantly be evolving as the ‘how’ things are done changes all the time with the advancement of technology and of customer demand.  A very obvious example is retail – twenty years ago the internet did not exist so there were no online sales channels; but the capabilities of a retail channel have not altered, Sales, Fulfilment and Billing are still capabilities, however the process of ‘how’ they sell, dispatch and take payment has altered dramatically.

In reviewing our tutorials we noticed that we already have tutorials on Capturing the Business Value Chain (a subset of the capabilities) and Business Process Modelling, but we don’t have a tutorial that focuses solely on business capability modelling.  In view of the current interest we aim to address this gap as soon as we can and a new tutorial will be available shortly.

A couple of months ago, in my blog article ‘Where have all the graphical models gone?‘ I described our approach to capturing knowledge about the enterprise using the forms in Protege rather than drawing diagrams. However, as the saying goes, a picture speaks a thousand words, so I would now like to highlight some new graphical features that are now available in Essential Architecture Manager and to explore some more of the background to our approach to capturing knowledge.

In Essential Architecture Manager, many of the elements that we capture are modelled so that they have a Definition of what the element is. This is then elaborated by an Architecture that describes how that element is composed. A useful way to think about this is that we black-box every element. The Definition is what we see on the outside of the box. We can still use that element in the overall model even if we know nothing more about how it works or how it is composed. However, if we do know more about the element - or we find out the details later on - we can then open the black-box and describe the Architecture, which tells us how the element is composed or how it works.

In fact, the Definition-Architecture approach means that we can define multiple architectures for an element. e.g. an Application Service or Application Provider can have both a Static Architecture and a Dynamic Architecture. It’s certainly more manageable to be able to separate these.

The Definitions are very naturally captured using the standard forms in Protege. We need to capture textual descriptions, relate the element directly to other elements in the model and so on. All of which is very productive, quick and straight-forward using the forms. This is why much of the input in Essential is form based.

In contrast, the Architectures add a contextual dimension to the relationships and dependencies that we are capturing between elements. We quickly found that the basic forms made this rather complex. Fortunately, the GraphWidget of Protege makes capturing Architectures much more straight-forward and we use this graphical tool in combination with the basic widgets for the capturing the Architecture.

The diagrams that are produced to capture these Architectures are focused on utility. Visually, they are basic and agnostic to any particular notation. However, whilst recognising that these diagrams may not be something you would hang on the wall, it would still be very useful to have these diagrams appear in the relevant analysis reports of Essential Viewer. This would be in addition to, not instead of, producing views in specific notations or other ‘graphical reports’.

To provide this capability, we have just released an update to the Essential Widgets and Essential Viewer that takes a snapshot of each architecture diagram during the repository publishing process. These snapshots are then presented in the relevant reports, such as Business Process Definition, Application Module Summary, Technology Product Details and so on. The update makes it very easy to bring in a relevant architecture diagram to any custom report. These updates to Viewer and Widgets have been packed into the latest version (1.3) of Essential Architecture Manager and all are available now to download.

But that’s not the end of the story for getting graphical views of your architecture model. Within the Protege environment, there is the Jambalaya SVG tab that provides a wealth of graphical reporting capabilities. Although we have been focusing on reporting within the Viewer environment - to open the analysis and view of the architecture to as wide an audience as possible in the organisation - there could be some value in sharing Jamabalaya reports with the community.

I would also like to draw your attention to Clint Cooper’s recent contribution - the Visio Export Tool. This produces a rendering either of selected areas or of the whole repository in Microsoft Visio. The resulting Visio file provides a readily-shared, graphical view of the model that can be easily manipulated to provide the view that you need to share with the wider audience in your organisation. Many thanks to Clint for sharing this with the rest of the Essential Project Community.

Although we take a forms-based approach to capturing the knowledge about the elements in the enterprise, there are a range of options for producing graphical views of this knowledge. From the snapshots of the architecture capture diagrams, clickable SVG diagrams to the Visio exports, there are now a range of options for getting the graphical view of your architecture that you need.

I have recently noticed a number of articles discussing the use of various maturity self assessment tools, and last week received notification that Forrester have launched a new tool.  In view of this current interest, I thought I would bring attention to a tool that we wrote and released a couple of years ago – EAvaluator – that is available for use from our EAS website.  The tool is free to use, and we collect no data about organisations so there is complete anonymity.

EAvaluator is a rules-driven assessment which takes the form of a multiple choice questionnaire.  Simply answer the sixteen questions, which should take about five minutes, and EAvaluator will provide an assessment of your organisation’s maturity broken down into eleven architecture disciplines.  The disciplines include things such as Architecture Process, Business Linkage, Decision Support and IT Investment and Acquisition.  For each of these eleven disciplines you are presented with a 12 bar indicator which gives you a rating for that category from 1-5 and some suggestions of what may be required to move to the next maturity level.

When we developed the tool we toyed with the idea of producing an overall assessment rating with some idea of priority regarding what to tackle first.  We decided not to do this as we were unsure of the benefit, thinking that actually focusing on the maturity level for each of the disciplines is more useful than simply looking at one overall score.

We have had feedback, however, that an overall assessment level is something that users of EAvaluator would like, and we noticed that Forrester did have an overall mark in their tool.  I guess that it is easier to monitor and report on one rather than eleven marks, so this is something that we have added to our list of things to look at – although unless we get feedback to the contrary – it is behind a number of Essential updates that we have planned.

However, creating this overall score is not as straightforward as simply adding up the scores and dividing by 16 as, obviously, some areas are more critical than others.  For example if you had a 5 for Architecture Communication but a 1 for Architecture Process and Architecture Development then actually the overall score should be nearer 1 than 2.5 as clearly there is little point doing fantastic communications if there is nothing of value to communicate – it isn’t always true that any publicity is good publicity!!  Any overall score would need to be rules driven and assess the maturity of each of the disciplines not only individually, but also compared to each other to give a true overall mark.

We think that maturity assessment tools are useful to allow you to take a step back, look at what is going well and areas that have maybe been overlooked and assess, with your particular organisation’s issues in mind, where to focus next.

We would be pleased to hear any feedback that you have on EAvaluator, or maturity assessments in general.

I was pleasantly surprised when I came across this definition of Knowledge Management by Dave Snowden.

I like this definition of KM but was struck by how it could equally apply to Enterprise Architecture, in particular when Dave mentions processes and technology, and especially when thinking about the contents of our Enterprise Architecture models.

Back in the 1990’s ‘boom’ days of Knowledge Management, there were a number of definitions of KM - many of which seemed to be tied to tools (hmmm, sounds familiar…) - but the thing that stuck in my mind was that knowledge has to be transformed from the ‘raw’ information about the organisation. This transformation is what makes the knowledge applicable to any relevant scenario, having captured information about specific instances of it. And this transformation of information into knowledge - to some extent analogous to the transformation of data into information - is what never seemed to happen in any of the early Knowledge Management solutions. Apparently, all that was required was an Intranet where anyone in the organisation could contribute their knowledge and then anyone who needs to apply that knowledge just searches the Intranet to find it. More latterly, Web 2.0 was going to solve those problems all over again using wikis and blogs and all the social tools, where people could contribute their knowledge so that others can find and apply it. For some areas, wikis can be very useful if notoriously hit-and-miss when searching.

And that’s the real trick that none of these solutions solve; how do you find the knowledge? How can a search engine make the link between a blog posting about a particular topic to a request for best practice on a process? Without the capability to do this, I don’t think any of these solutions are what I would call Knowledge Management. Without the ability to abstract the contextual, subjective information to build generalised knowledge we can’t apply these valuable contributions to other similar scenarios.

How do we transform the information into knowledge? Well, at its simplest, we need some form of ‘framework’ on which to hang the information that we have to hand, so that we can apply objective definitions to what the information is about and relate it to other information with strong semantics. We can then use this knowledge framework to query - not just search! - the information that has been captured from many different sources and in a meaningful way.

Wait a moment, that sounds just like an EA meta model. It certainly does and that’s when I start to wonder, is it that actually Enterprise Architecture and Knowledge Management should be effectively the same thing - it is just that their current guises are particular perspectives on the knowledge base? For me, Knowledge Management has to be more than a bunch of Intranet sites and wikis and similarly, Enterprise Architecture models have to be more than a bunch of diagrams and pictures if we are to truly apply the knowledge that people are trying to capture.

The meta model gives us a framework for representing knowledge about the enterprise that defines the types of information that we need to capture and how this information relates. The resulting model of the organisation enables us to apply the knowledge to the particular problem that we are dealing with right now, whether it is a large scale, strategic issue or an fine-grained query from the operational or tactical agenda.

And this is what Enterprise Architecture is really about. EA is not the modelling. Rather, EA is about the application of knowledge about the enterprise (ideally, represented in a model, because it rapidly gets very complex) to the problems at hand.

In taking a knowledge representation approach to EA and KM (and I believe we should), is Enterprise Architecture modelling the same as Knowledge Management?

Following on from my blog of 19th May, How can organisations afford the luxury of enterprise architecture in the middle of a global recession?, a more detailed article is available for download from the News and Industry section of the EAS website.  In the article I examine the reasons why Enterprise Architecture has become so popular and focus on the areas of importance when budgets are tight, including application consolidation and project portfolio management.

I read Mike Kavis’ blog Is Enterprise Architecture only for big companies? a couple of weeks ago and I think that the points that he makes are spot on.  I certainly agree with Mike that EA is as beneficial for an SME as it is for a large organisation.  How can understanding more about your organisation and having that information to hand ever be a bad thing when trying to make decisions, whether they are regarding technology, people, or the focus for the future?

I am also in complete agreement that 20% of EA is better than none.  I wonder sometimes if people confuse accuracy with completeness here.  Certainly if you are working from the wrong information then this could be more damaging than having no information.  But partial information must be better than none, especially if you are picking the elements of EA that are important in that instance.  The key in any organisation, large or small, is to identify your most pressing business need and use EA to solve that need (see my blog from March 15th – Identifying the problems your EA needs to solve).  Some kind of framework is important in as much as you need a consistent approach to your EA efforts, but this is more pressing in a large organisation with many more architects, each with their own perspective!

As regards cost, if you have had a look through our website, you will have noticed that one of our aims is to make EA more accessible to SME’s.  It is our view that it is hard to ‘do’ EA without a tool (see Jason’s blog from Feb 19th – PowerPoint and Excel for Architecture Modelling; Why Not?), and that, to date, SME’s have been unable to join the party, so to speak, because buying and introducing commercial EA tools often requires significant investment.  We hope that Essential, being free and relatively easy to install and use, has removed at least this barrier.

It’s been just over 6 months since we launched The Essential Project, and we thought we would take this opportunity to provide you with a brief update.

Firstly, downloads.  There have been around 1,500 downloads to date.  We believe this shows an exceptionally high interest in open source EA tools such as Essential, and we are delighted that so many of you have taken the time to download and assess the tool.  We hope (and have heard via the grapevine) that Essential is providing benefits to  both large organisations as well as smaller SME’s, and also proving useful to the many EA consultants out there.

Next, to the forums.  We have had some interesting debates on the forums, a few of which have led to a number of extension projects being kicked off via the ECP (Essential Community Process).  This has really pleased us because we want the community to grow and to begin to shape the future development of The Essential Project, so the fact that the community has started to dictate the type and priority of changes and updates is fantastic.

And this leads us nicely on to sharing.  We have this week received our second contribution by a member of the community.  Again, one of our aims is for the community to be actively engaged in the development work, primarily to add additional expertise and experience to the project, so receiving another contribution, with the promise of more on the way, is a great bonus – a big thank you from the Team!

The contribution process also allows the load to be shared – as this is an open source venture The Essential Project Team do this in our spare time, so any help is always appreciated.  On this note I would like to take the opportunity to stress that we always reply as quickly as we can to queries via the forum, but if it takes a bit longer on occasion, please bear with us!

Lastly, again in response to demand from the community, we have created a demonstration video which can be accessed via the Home page or the Tutorials page, a sample repository which can be downloaded via the Share page as well as an early alpha release of an Integration Tool that allows existing EA information to be imported from external tools (e.g. spreadsheets), which again can be found on the Share page.

All in all not a bad first 6 months!

We hope the project continues to grow at the current pace and we thank you all for your involvement so far.  As always, we are keen for the community to be as involved as possible, so please let us know your thoughts – good and bad!

We have a number of enhancements to the Essential Project currently going through the Essential Community Process, so we thought it would be worth a quick re-visit of the process and the enhancements we are working on.

We are keen that enhancements to Essential are in line with what is required by the community, and that these include enhancements both requested and contributed by the community.

The Essential Project Team will provide governance of the Essential Project Tools and co-ordinate requests for enhancements, taking other similar requests into account before designing and delivering them.

Likewise, contributions of completed components, e.g. a new analysis report or meta model extension, can be shared by contributors through the Essential Project website. When a meta model extension is received, the Team will produce the update pack to make it simple for other community members to introduce the extension to their Essential installation.

We feel that requests for additional capabilities (modelling, reporting or software extensions) should be developed with the community to make sure that as many different perspectives on the same requirement are considered. The ECP has been designed to bring a sense of order to how the contribution process works.

What is the ECP?

The Essential Community Process (or ECP) is about capturing requirements and reviewing the proposed solution with as wide a group as possible. Although in many cases (especially in the early stages of the Project) the Essential Project Team will be the ones developing the solution, the process does not assume this - it could be any member of the community.

The process can be iterative and will operate as follows:
•    Request
•    Discuss and gather further requirements from community
•    Design proposed solution
•    Circulate to the community for defined period of time
•    Implement
•    Test within the community
•    Review tests and approve
•    Release update

Clearly there’s a balance to strike between taking a controlled approach and the time it takes to produce the answer to the request, and we will ensure that the time taken is proportionate to the scope and complexity of the requirement being met (in some cases, perhaps only days).

We have already completed an extension to allow capture of software licenses (ECP – 1) using this process, which is available as a candidate release for download via the Share option in Community.

We have another two extensions currently in progress:-
•    ECP – 2 - to provide a capability for capturing and modelling Organisational Policies and Compliance
and
•    ECP 3 – which is split into two parts - ECP 3.1 and ECP 3.2  and introduces the capability to capture references to external documentation for any element in the repository.

If you have any thoughts on requirements that you have in these areas, or any other suggestions for enhancements, please let us know by taking part in the Essential Project Enhancements and Extensions forum.

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