EA Forum Event

Surely this question has been answered? As it turns out, many global organisations are still struggling to define enterprise architecture (EA) – and a workable definition is illusive since it often becomes too long and complicated to be useful.

Our speaker, Jan Mentz, is a Senior Lecturer at UNISA and is currently completing his PhD on the definition of EA. In his presentation, Jan will tackle some of the problems with defining EA by giving us insight into the lack of theoretical (and possibly philosophical!) grounding that is, or should be inherent to EA. During this discussion, he will highlight the issues that stem from EA’s foundation in information systems and information technology, and consider the usefulness of ISO/IEC 42010:2007 (a standard that deals with recommended practice for architectural description of software-intensive systems) as a basis for defining EA.

Come and join this conversation; Jan’s viewpoint is refreshing, and will change the way you think about EA!

In his presentation Hein Lorenzen, Architecture Manager at Internet Solutions, will present the journey that Internet Solutions has embarked on, using enterprise architecture to address issues such as process standardisation and data integrity. Hein will also highlight the use of industry-specific reference models and show how Internet Solutions utilises them to help with the establishment of their enterprise architecture capability.

Hein has been the Architecture Manager at Internet Solutions for the past two years. Previous to this, he worked at Sanlam for fifteen years and then at Sentech as their Enterprise Architect. Hein holds a BCom IS (Hon) from UCT as well as a number of post graduate diplomas.

Are you expecting Configuration Management to sort out your Asset and Inventory Management challenges? Is the CMDB (Configuration Management Database) the solution to your asset management problems?

In his presentation Alryn Smit questions whether the IT terms, Configuration Management, Asset Management, Inventory Management, Service Management and CMDB are understood within themselves or whether they are being used too generically in a bid to address other issues in the organization. Alryn believes that, in most cases, organizations have a CMDB which is just a “collection of the chaos in the IT environment”.

Alryn Smit is the founder and chief solutions architect of Asmit Technology Solutions with more than a decade’s experience in systems management technology.

In South Africa there are few ITAC certified professionals since the process of attaining the certification is seen to be daunting and costly. Jan de Beer, who was awarded his ITAC Level II (Master Certified IT Architect) in January 2009, has agreed to share his experiences around achieving his ITAC certification and his thoughts on the value that the ITAC certification has brought him from a professional stand-point. In his presentation, Jan will discuss what is needed to attain the certification as well as answer any questions about it.

This presentation focuses on the new KING III code and the key requirements that can be enabled by EA and IT Governance; namely the development and maintenance of an IT Charter/policy that follows a formal Internal Control Framework, and the maintenance of Business / IT alignment and its documentation in a formal IT Strategy.

The presentation focuses on an enterprise architecture (EA) survey that Sybase conducted through ITWeb earlier this year. The survey aimed to determine the adoption level of EA in South Africa as well as to gain perspective on its uses locally. Participants ranged from IT directors in blue chip companies to business analysts in research groups in a diverse number of organisations. The results show trends within the local EA market, both in terms of its current state and what we can expect in the future.

The presentation includes a discussion on:

1. SOA-in-brief described in practical business terms
2. “The Good, The Bad & The Ugly” in SOA
3. How does one establish SOA? – a real example

This presentation is a discussion on a project governance framework. It focuses on the definition of project goals, clarification of roles and responsibilities, risk management, change management, evidentiary requirements for an audit, and the enablement of project delivery.

Event took place during July 2008 at Emperors Palace, Johannesburg, South Africa.

This presentation includes the manner in which the domain architectures are used in the solution architecture to support project execution. The solution architecture comprises project definition, business requirement specifications, system requirement specifications and application integration specifications.