EA Voices

By: Ben Geller, VP Marketing, Troux

Enterprise Architecture (EA) has changed exponentially over the years with transforming from an IT-driven initiative to a business strategy necessity.  EA as a field formally took shape in 1987 with the publication of John Zachman’s article “A Framework For Information Systems Architecture”. The paper described both the need for and the challenges of managing increasingly scattered systems:

“The cost involved and the success of the business depending increasingly on its information systems require a disciplined approach to the management of those systems.”

In today’s world we are seeing dramatic changes in how reaching this information system nirvana plays out. Why? Because we live in a world where digital access and apps are available for everything and anything. With digital and technological disruptors firmly rooted in our world there is a massive mind shift at play in how we interact with technology as well as how we expect to get things done.

Naturally, that has significant impact on EA, an IT-rooted discipline that both drives and manages change across the technology landscape.

Consumers are now accustomed to doing things themselves, and those expectations carry over into the business environment. Thanks to our “there’s-an-app-for-that” world, the IT department isn’t the only one who interacts with technology. We live in a world where everyone wants to be hands-on to leverage IT solutions and information.

What does this mean for EA?

These shifts open up a world of opportunity, or better yet a major necessity, for a function that can connect the enterprise dots to achieve a greater business outcome. EA is in the best position to step into that role. Critical business decisions require seeing the big picture in any situation. The big picture is gained through insights that answer the businesses most important questions. Successful EA should empower and inform stakeholders to answer these questions and make sound decisions using combined enterprise knowledge.

Today’s Version of EA: Beyond the IT Function

In December 2013 Gartner published Predicts 2014: Enterprise Architect Role Headed for Dramatic Change, highlighting the future version of EA which crosses business functions and often lives outside of IT altogether.

• Over 78% of EA practitioners are focused on leveraging EA to integrate business and IT, as well as to grow and transform their businesses.

• Today, 55% of organizations are supporting EA with either the collaboration or participation of business leaders.

At Troux, we call this new era of EA enterprise intelligence. Enterprise intelligence gives the C-suite and their decision-making counterparts a heightened level of transparency by establishing a line-of-site that spans the enterprise as a whole without weighing down IT resources to make it happen.

The Way Forward

If you are reading this thinking, we are so behind the curve, go easy on yourself. The new era is in the early stages. Gartner estimates that market penetration of business architecture is at 20 percent. There is a lot of ground to be covered. Just be sure your business and IT worlds are interacting and integrating – that is what the people want, after all.  

Make Strategic Business and IT Decisions: Download the Troux Answers Guide to gauge your ability to make strategic business and IT decisions. The guide takes you through questions like:

• Where do we have disconnects between IT and the business?
• What are our current IT costs for supporting the business?
• What is the consolidated view of our application landscape?
• What are our enterprise interdependencies?
• How should the future landscape need to look to support our business?

I am currently working on OpenBSD 5.5 (amd64) running in a virtual machine using VirtualBox on my Mac. After installing the guest machine, I expected being able to ssh to it via the IP assigned to the virtual network interface:

# ifconfig em0
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000
em0:
[...]
 inet 10.0.2.15 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.0.2.255

In my case I had configured the network adapter with NAT (Native Address Translation), which means that the host machine acts as DHCP server and router for the guest.
Hoping I could reach the guest via its IP in the NAT virtal network, I switched to the OS X terminal and did:

$ ssh aj@10.0.2.15

… and no luck. Something is in the way.

It seems that, in order to ssh to a Virtualbox guest, you need to enable port forwarding between the host and the guest(s) you want to access. Open the VM settings > Network and select the network adapter (in my case Adapter 1). Create a new rule with the following attributes:

• Name: SSH-host (or whatever you like)
• Protocol: TCP
• Host:
• Host port: 2222 (this is the TCP port you will use on localhost to connect to the guest)
• Guest IP:
• Guest Port: 22 (this is the SSH TCP port)

Press OK and open a prompt on your host machine to connect to the VM:

# ssh localhost -p 2222
Last login: Wed Jun 11 19:56:32 2014 from 10.0.2.2
OpenBSD 5.5 (GENERIC.MP) #315: Wed Mar  5 09:37:46 MST 2014

The rule opens a TCP port (2222) on localhost of the host machine, which is then tunneled to any arbitrary port on the target machine (port 22). In order to enable easy to my VMs, I copy my public key across using ssh-copy-id:

$ ssh-copy-id localhost -p 2222 -l aj

Voila!

Social media have penetrated our lives. We share ideas, experiences, thought, complaints, and compliments with everybody. At the same time we see quite some controversy concerning the  privacy policies of companies such as Facebook and Twitter. Some people even think that European privacy regulation does not apply to them, as they are US-based companies. 

In our research project “New Models for the Social Enterprise” privacy regulation was one of the topics we tackled. The good news is that we as consumers outside the US are still governed by EU regulation and national policies. If a Dutch company, for example, uses data from Twitter to analyze what is mentioned concerning their brand, the mood etc., Dutch laws apply (the Wet Bescherming Persoonsgegevens). The data collecteda and analysed  by social media mining companies, such as Coosto, falls under the jurisdiction of country they work. If a company uses or stores Tweets, Facebook messages etc., they are data processors themselves. This does not hold for the use or storage of aggregated data that cannot be linked to individual users (which is not the same as anonymised data; data hardly ever is anonymous if collected in larger quantities…).

Mail exchange between companies and customers, or mail in general, is private. This brought the question to my mind whether or not direct messages in, for example, Twitter, are really private or not? In the example data we had from Twitter, direct messages did not appear, but this could be coincidental. The privacy rules of Twitter  do not mention direct messages.

In order to get clarification, we simply asked Twitter (privacy@twitter.com), on April 24th:

Dear sir, madam, 

I have been a frequent and enthusiastic user of Twitter, and will be so in the years to come, I expect. However, I do have a question concerning privacy. Everything I tweet is open to the public, and tweets are brought together and sold for business purposes to companies etc. So much is clear.

Direct messages, however, give the feeling of being private, similar to e-mail messages. From your privacy statement I cannot derive whether of not DMs are treated differently than normal tweets. I.e., are they also analyzed, aggregated and/or sold to third parties? 

 Kind regards,

@WilJanssen

It took a while and some friendly reminders, but in the end, I received an answer:

 

Encouraging, to say the least. Everything in a DM remains within Twitter and is not shared or sold. Maybe the answer above is not a legally correct answer, but still, it is clear. The use of DM’s is common in webcare, but should be used wisely. It is more effective to make sure the mail addresses of customers are known and correct and to use mail for information that is personal or private. Mail is an effective means for communication, easy to store and archive, and legally binding. Social media have a role in a swift and informal discussion. Use it wisely in a business relation.

Wil Janssen is managing director of InnoValor and guest author for our blog. InnoValor and BiZZdesign are research partners in the ‘New Models for the Social Enterprise’ project.

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