Traveled to Cairo, Egypt, land of the pharaohs and pyramids, last week on a training assignment, and learned how Egypt represents a melting pot of Mediterranean cultures. More on melting pots later, but first, as usual, I’ll spend a bit of time discoursing about the food. During a previous visit many years ago, I was introduced to foul (fava beans) and had to try it again…this time with eggs for breakfast topped with spices…yummy. Also, had the Egyptian version of a Philadelphia cheese steak along with traditional Egyptian pickled vegetables.
OK, back to melting pots. I taught the three day Solutions Frameworks (NGOSS) Overview and the two day Business Process Framework (eTOM) Implementer’s workshop. Students attending the courses wanted to know how to use the frameworks to meet a variety of needs. The frameworks truly do provide a “melting pot” that can be used to meet many challenges faced by our industry today.
Several students were interested in the dynamic extensibility aspects of the SID that minimize changes to a data base and its underlying information architecture. Also, how the SID can be used to support application integration was another expectation.
The Business Process Framework (eTOM) is typically thought of and used as a process framework by service providers and operators around the world. How to do this was one of the student’s reasons for attending the training. In addition, other students wanted to know how the eTOM could be used as a checklist for introducing new offerings to the market as well as a checklist to introduce new technologies. In fact, the students learned that any process-related project can take advantage of the eTOM. Why start from scratch!
The use of the eTOM doesn’t stop with these uses. Other students were curious about how the eTOM can be used as the basis for functional requirements and for organizing them. Coupled with the other frameworks, Information, Integration, and Application, an enterprise can leverage them to begin the specification for any type of application. Use in their entirety, they can be used to begin to craft an Enterprise Application Architecture. Check out the white paper at http://soa.omg.org/Uploaded%20Docs/SOA/SOA_Maturity.pdf and ask yourself how the frameworks can be used to incrementally migrate to a service-oriented application architecture. The Integration Framework has undergone some extensive changes to support this, including the introduction of business service categories and enterprise-specific platform architectures. Many members view the Application Framework as a template platform architecture.
My next training adventure takes me to St. Louis, Missouri, and occurs the first week of next year, but I will be traveling to China and South Africa between now and then on other assignments. So, never fear, I will be blogging about these end of year travels and such.
Posted
11-24-2009 10:15 AM
by
John Reilly