Enterprise Architecture exists to drive IT technology planning across the organization. My question to the EA community at large is whether or not EA should be pushing Open Source software specifically or helping the rest of IT evaluate open source solutions on a case-by-case basis.

I just sat through a webinar from Forrester Research on a new service that they are offering. They can come into an organization and help an EA team figure out where they are and where they should go. It sounds like an interesting option to help an EA team define their go-forward direction. Gene Leganza has a lot of EA experience and I would trust his ability to help assess the directions of an EA team.

My intention for creating EACouncil.com was to get people in Enterprise Architecture to share ideas and content. Please take a few minutes and add an entry. Even if you are looking for information, create a poll or post a question on this site. I get a lot of people coming to the site now and it could be a great asset by the community at large.

So, dive in and join the fun!

Steve

I read a Gartner article that said that most organizations could save a substantial amount of money by implementing an effective application retirement plan. They also said that, on average, organizations could sunset 10% of their current application inventory without affecting the business at all.

Most organizations do a pretty good job of bringing in new technology but do a very bad job of retiring the old applications. This introduces more complexity into the environment and increases the costs of IT. Supporting

I've got AD integration working with Ubuntu using Likewise. It's free but not open source. That makes it a little scary.

SUSE Linux has AD and LDAP integration baked in.

Some requirements:
AD or LDAP integration.
Ability to lock down the desktop based on role.
Lotus Notes Client availability
OpenOffice 3.x

If anyone has any ideas, please share.

I just read about an open source Enterprise Architecture toolkit. I'm going to give it a look. Could be interesting. Given the budgets that EA teams usually get, open source could be a great way to get something useful. If you have tried this tool, let me know what you think.

The web site is:
http://www.enterprise-architecture.org/

Steve

Digg.com always has tons of lists of things. This site has a cool list of open source alternatives to commercial software.

http://www.pdfconverter.com/home/resources/articles/entrepreneur-softwar...

EA exists to align IT strategy with Business strategy while minimizing long-term IT costs. EA uses several tools to do this including Roadmaps, Technology Standards, and Application Release Plans. An Architecture Review Board (ARB) is used to ensure projects align with the long-term strategy.

EA has to leverage as much as possible to be successful. EA shouldn't try to boil the ocean. There are a lot of inputs that make EA

I found this blog and thought it was pretty cool. This guy is a VM specialist but has some great articles on the future of technology. I didn't see anything on 3-D printing but it's still worth a read.

http://www.trendcaller.com/