One of the things I appreciate with TOGAF, is the initial step of defining a clear set of architectual principles. My direct experience from a large EA program where principles were missing was that technical discusion could not be solved using a common ground of reasoning. Good principles help us solve issues by giving us something to solve arguments within the EA team. Principles becomes especially useful when there are few of them (maximum 10), they are clear and practical, and they have a clear order of precedence.

We are in the process of formalizing the EA Discipline. We have recently created our first roadmap for collaboration (a series of projects over a 3 year time period). Stakeholders at all levels are on board with the roadmap, but unfortunately no action is being taken. So my question to all of you is who should drive roadmap execution? To me it seems obvious - a program manager. However we don’t have any program managers in our very small PMO. I know academically EA is not supposed to drive roadmap/program execution. Should I not be using these terms interchangeably? What are your thoughts?

I wanted to post some post some pros and cons for using OpenOffice.org in the enterprise. All testing for this was done with OOo 3.1.

An implementation of OOo would have to include a fair amount of user segmentation for any organization of any size. There are just too many issues that would lead me to say it will work for 100% of the users.

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Autofilter issue - If you hide several rows via Autofilter and then paste or delete data in cells that are still visible, hidden cells are overwritten as well. With Excel, those hidden fields are left untouched.

Excel macros are spotty at best. Calc has some of the functions available but not

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