I’ve been reading articles by Daniel Minoli for some years now, so it was with some anticipation that I opened this book. It has about 450 pages and two parts. Part one, The Logical Level Enterprise Architecture, Business Process Modeling and SOA. Part two is the Infrastructure Level, Migrating to State of the Art Environments in Enterprises with IT Intensive Assets: Network Virtualization. Not quite the longest title I’ve ever encountered, but I did have to write it down.
There is an interesting contradiction in that the book lists 17 frameworks and standards associated with EA and provides a mathematical definition of an architecture, a degree of rigor that is rare. But, then it covers off the “Official” Enterprise Architecture standards; not very well, in less than ten pages. Perhaps that’s a reflection of how much influence these standards don’t have.
Part one covers Zachman to Business Process Modeling and Service Oriented Architecture Modeling. All reasonably well connected and illuminated with simple but adequate examples while exposing the reader to ideas like MDA, BPML, BPMN, XML, UML, WSDL, SOAP, ESB’s and Service Registries. All at about 10,00 feet. While the book explains the find-bind-execute paradigm it isn’t deep enough to discuss service granularity.
Then almost suddenly at about page 220 the book becomes a hardware overview. It’s all about SAN’s, fiber links and evolving network technologies. Which I contend is too deep for managers and not nearly deep enough to be useful. The next thing you know you are mapping the OSI comms model to the SOA Networking Architecture Framework. (SNAF) and talking about REST. Makes me wonder what the author’s been working on recently. Finally, the book finishes off with an equally shallow section on Virtualization and Grid computing in a strangely unsatisfying way, its almost as if the author was in a hurry to finish the book.
The book is intended for CIOs, CTOs and senior managers and it says so. Basically it is a simplified summary of the current state of EA without the applications. Its of limited use to architects and just detailed enough for managers to get by with; if they don’t push their luck.
Minioli, Daniel (2008), Enterprise Architecture A to Z, CRC, Press, Auerbach Publications, Boca Raton
ISBN 978-0-8493-8517-9
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One of the goals of the book was to bring architectural concepts to the technology layer (networks, storage, workstations, etc.), where they are NOT normally applied by the architectural frameworks that are out there; that is the reason for focusing on that topic in Part 2 (the book clearly states that is comprised of TWO parts — so no surprise there to anyone that looks at the Table of Contents.)
Having written several books, I very often state in my Preface the following concept: No one can learn a topic in all its glory from a SINGLE book — read this book (of mine), see its approach and focus, and then go out and buy/read 10 books!
DM/May 2010.