IT Strategies from Oracle

Having an Enterprise Architecture is essential for successfully rolling out an IT strategy for almost any company. Enterprise Architecture is all about defining what your business wants to do from the perspective of why you want to do it, and translating it into how to do it. There are many frameworks available that help you define an architecture, be it Business, Data, Application or Technology related. For the latter, Oracle has developed a technology architecture, called the Oracle Reference Architecture (ORA). The ORA is part of the IT Strategies from Oracle.



The IT Strategies from Oracle give you a whole library of whitepapers, not only to develop a Reference Architecture for your own, by adapting the ORA to your needs, but it also focuses on the surrounding Enterprise Technology Strategies and Enterprise Solution Designs. In other words, ITSO covers both the horizontal technology perspectives (SOA, BPM, EDA, etc.), but also the vertical business perspectives (Utilities, Government, etc.).

Now, in case you think that this is all about Oracle Technology products, you might be surprised: the whole ITSO / Oracle Reference Architecture is Vendor-Neutral. It is only scoped to Oracle's product portfolio. Now, one might ask themselves: what technology product area's doesn't Oracle have products for, so that shouldn't be too much of an issue as far as completeness is concerned.

ITSO can help you organizing complex product landscapes, by means of a holistic approach to technology adoption. By covering the technology as a whole, you can reduce risk and become more in control of your IT solutions.

The ITSO, and, being part of it, the Oracle Reference Architecture is not an Architecture Framework. For this, many solutions are already available, of which TOGAF and Oracle's Enterprise Architecture Framework (OEAF) are good examples. The ORA can be perfectly integrated in any of the currently available frameworks.

If you are interested in the ITSO, please visit www.oracle.com/goto/itstrategies, you will find a great deal of information there:

Oracle Reference Architectures
These cover

• Application Infrastructure Foundation,
• Service Orientation,
• Service-Oriented Integration,
• Software Engineering,
• Security,
• Management and Monitoring

Enterprise Technology Strategies for Service-Oriented Architecture
Practitioner Guides

• SOA Foundation
• Creating an SOA Roadmap,
• Frameworks for Governance,
• Identifying Services,
• Determining ROI,
• Software Engineering

Enterprise Technology Strategies for Business Process Management
These documents contain

• BPM Foundation
• BPM Infrastructure
• Practitioner Guide on Creating a BPM Roadmap

I am sure you will find something useful in this library for your enterprise information technology strategy.
Be sure to check it out!

Finally took the step: Twitter

I have just tweeted for the very first time in my life. Awkward feeling, especially since I am not altogether convinced whether twitter really suits me. On the other hand, blogging takes a lot of time which I can spare really, so maybe twitter will fill the gap...
My account, for anyone interested in following me: OraClever (I have no followers yet, so please...?:-)

TOGAF 9 Certified

In the week before Christmas, I attended a TOGAF 9 course (http://www.the-unit.nl/). This was particularly interesting, since I have certain architectural responsibilities at the company I work for. TOGAF is becoming more and more a world leading framework for developing architectures.
It was a five-day training, and it has been a most interesting week. The trainer (Rienk de Kok) was very knowledgeable at the subject and clearly had a lot of working experience. He led us through the wondrous world of developing architectures, and at the end of the course week, we had to take the first exam (TOGAF Foundation). We all passed the exam, which gave us the key to the next exam: TOGAF Certified. In order to pass this exam, you have not only to know the terms and put them in the right place in the framework (Foundation exam), but also need to know how to apply the framework in a series of 8 cases that are examined in the Certified exam. I must say, it was a difficult exam. Not only because the cases are quite extensive (lots of reading), but the answers to the question that comes with each case each are differently awarded. In other words: 3 of the 4 answers are more or less correct in one way or another. There is one best answer, a second best answer and a least good answer. Beside these 3 answers there is one distractor (if you can call it a distractor... sometimes it is quite hard to tell...).
Today I passed the TOGAF Certified exam, which makes me TOGAF 9 Certified.

5 stars for the training and the trainer!
(and for me, passing both exams at the first attempt :-))