Tag Archives: TOGAF

Using Business Capability Models to inform Tech Training Requirements

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by in General, Oracle

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We have been going through a slow process of reviewing and refreshing our skills and capabilities within our Architectural team both in terms of what skills exist, and the necessary skill sets that need to be cultivated.

The EA capabilities views such as the Oracle one below which has been drawn from Oracle’s reference model (ITSO) can be used to aide determining what technical capabilities are needed in the solution space. But could also be used to support the determination of skills needs within an organisation in both breadth and to an extent depth.

Where the breadth equates to skills for all the tools mapped onto the technical capability model (ideally validated by mapping the technical capabilities to business capability model to establish utilisation). That mapping also informs the skills depth based on the number of times anyone technical capability is mapped to the business model.

OracleIntegrationRA-capabilities

This can be taken further through the use of value chains in the business domain you can determine which capabilities need to be focused on, therefore what technical capabilities and potential skills development are of most value to your organisation.

So what starts out as an abstract business activity, quickly delivers technical domain value. What is ‘fun’ is that as a Technical EA I can use the work from my business colleagues to make a compelling argument for training budget.

Useful links:

Oracle IT Strategies and logging 

20 Saturday Jun 2015

Posted by in General, ITSO & OEAF, Oracle, Technology

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So I have an objective to get myself certified as an Oracle Technical Architect. Although the training is only open to Oracle and Partners, the exam is open to all.  As you may have guessed from my blog posts I use a lot of Oracle technology. However the Technical Architect examination is based  largely on Oracle’s IT Strategies library, and usually referred to as ITSO. Before non-Oracle users switch off, the ITSO is actually built around presenting solid good solution agnostic practises, and only once that is laid out does the material overlay Oracle products. So at least 75% percent of the material applies regardless of the vendor (yes cynics will say the practises will naturally lead you to products – but hey someone has to be bad guy).  This actually makes it a worthwhile accreditation – as far as any accreditation can go (no I’ve not done a detailed comparison against Open Group’s Certified Architect – very expensive or the BCS accreditation – bound to BCS membership). TOGAF gives your framework, processes, means to communicate, and the ITSO does well at explaining the technical considerations and could be mapped onto the TOGAF Technical Reference Model (TRM) and Standards Information Base (SIB).

The point, I wanted to get across was in the ITSO is an element on Management and Monitoring (E16583-03 if you want the document reference on the Oracle Technology Network). It makes a lot of really good points about monitoring challenges such as bottom up approach where people monitor the parts of the full capability that they’re responsible for, rather than developing monitoring from a business perspective. The rationale for adopting the business based approach is explained (this is not to say you don’t go  into the technical measures & monitors of looking at your infrastructure, databases, services etc. But from the business approach you will capture the information to understand reporting from a user perspective which is how you’ll here about issues.  Through your detailed monitoring decomposition to get the right specific data points you can then look at correlation of monitoring data for root cause analysis, but also see and .

What the I think the document misses, or at least underemphasises is the ever increasing importance of the monitoring and logging of what is happening as systems and environments become ever more elastic and self managing, and have as IBM call it  autonomics. or self healing, self scaling characteristics. So consider trying to diagnose a problem when a user complains of intermittent performance issues, but you have Kubernetes or another tool scaling up your environment for a period and then back down.  Only through measuring from a business context will you able to understand when the user might perceive performance as an issue. Then with  excellent logging and audit data as to what components are doing at all levels – so services maybe behaving perfectly but your scaling mechanisms are scaling back too soon.

This leads to another consideration, for those organisations that absolutely committed to idea of self healing and proving in resilience production, as the famous Netflix Chaos Monkey does. You need to be able to correlate the monkey’s activities to what is happening in your environment. Has the monkey uncovered an issue that manifests in a manner you hadn’t expected and as a result your user see intermittent issues.

This all leads me to a rather good presentation from Jimmi Dyson at RedHat who showed the simple value of ensuring you can get semantic meaning from logging. As that means you and slice and dice the information to get understanding of what is happening and lead to root cause. In Oracle land Oracle Enterprise Manage (OEM) is ensuring the semantic understanding when it come to known products.

I’ve meandered a bit, so key points  consider ITSO or any other vendor equivalent for sources of good practise. Monitor and measure from a business perspective, but still ensure your collecting detailed semantically meaningful metrics.

More TOGAF Training Tips

20 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by in General, TOGAF

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Open Group TOGAF

That magical logo you can use once TOGAF Certified

A couple of my colleagues are preparing to TOGAF exams (and training). As is the case with these things the subject of tips, tricks and helpful resources come up.  I’ve blogged in the past on this, and now made those blog entries easier to find with a TOGAF category on my blog (https://mp3muncher.wordpress.com/category/technology/togaf/). But I also came across a couple of useful resources through the TOGAF for Architecture Linkedin Group. Particuarly a free Massively Open Only Course (MOOC) provided by an Australian University – https://www.open2study.com/courses/introduction-to-enterprise-architecture.  The MOOC contains almost 4.5 hours of video material – so it will give a solid picture (where as a Architecting the Enterprise training is 4 days) (note Architecting the Enterprise appear to have tweaked their branding now to AtE). In addition to this a couple of other sites / books that came recommended in recent LinkedIn discussions are:

Update: It is worth registering with Orbus Software‘s website (registration is free) as they provide a substantial number of resources on TOGAF like postes of each of the key phases which can be downloaded once registered.  In addition they have a number of blogs regarding EA, ITIL etc.

TOGAF Certification – Passing on the Helpful Tips

10 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by in General, Technology, TOGAF

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Having successfully become certified with TOGAF 9. I thought it would be good to share some hints, tips and observations that have helped me along the way.  So as you may know the exam is conducted through multiple choice – but that simple examination approach should not give a false sense of ease – because a lot of the options will sound right (until you understand the exact technical meanings).

  • Training course or not to training course, that is the question? Personally I wouldn’t taken on the exam without the training – the TOGAF full text runs to 1000 pages. The course for me at least gave 1000 foot view, an some insight from practitioners and the 1st set of suggestions on preparing for the exam.
  • One of the key points I picked up is the terminology and language is very important. Understand the key terms and read questions very carefully and a lot of information will standout. As I was told when on the training, it is surprisingly common for the right answer to often be the longest textual answer because it is being semantically accurate.
  • Books – well I’d suggest that the full TOGAF® Version 9.1 manual is a desk reference for whilst practicing TOGAF. To get the exam under your belt read TOGAF® 9 Foundation Study Guide you will need to pretty much need to know this stuff cover to cover. Although the guide is Foundation stage – it will get you a long way and you can add additional knowledge from the TOGAF® Version 9.1 A Pocket Guide
  • From these guides you need to know the ADM itself, including the steps in each phase, what the techniques are for and why you might use them (things like gap analysis etc).
  • The study guide has mock stage 1 exams, and each section also has practice questions – take advantage of them. The questions are stylistically pretty good, although in hindsight perhaps erring of the easier side, and the mock exam questions got progressively harder in my opinion.  But the real exam for me, question 1 was a real curve ball.
  • There are other sources of mock questions (including other books) – I found the mock exams at http://theopenarch.com/ helpful.  After each mock exam, I reviewed the answers that I got wrong to try and understand why they are wrong – which helped me identify any areas of reading I was weak on.
  • Read the questions very carefully, there are sometimes indicators as the right answer in the question. Also watch for things like, not what answer in A-E is right, but which one is wrong.
  • Timing – 60 minutes for 40 questions in part 1 doesn’t sound like very long – particularly given the advise of take your time read the questions very carefully. But actually, you’ll find once you’ve got a handle on a chunk of the study guide you’ll find you can rip through some of the questions very quickly giving you time to think carefully about the questions that aren’t so easy – the exam also has means by which you can go back and review questions if you want.
  • For the harder questions, in part 1 I ended up writing A-E on the paper and crossing off the answers I could eliminate. That made it easier (for me at least) to then focus on dissecting the 1 or 2 possible options left. In part 2, I applied a similar approach – part 2 is more about which phase(s) do I need to use and what are the steps. So I took each possible answer and wrote on paper what phase(s) then answer needed and then went through each answer option teasing out the terminology for the different steps (and the phases they originated from). The option with the most steps from the correct phase, appear to give me the best or second best answers.
  • Part 1 is closed book, but part 2 you are meant to be able to refer to the TOGAF material – for me the link to the TOGAF reference failed.  So best not to bank on having it available.

Aside all of this there are classic exam suggestions – give yourself time to get to the exam location – a calm composed mind is crucial for this.  Try and rush through this and you’re potentially facing a disaster. Make sure you have all the information the test centre requires (id’s etc) – one less stress.  Travel light as you wont be able to take anything into the test room. Finally, try and get into ‘the zone’ and roll with the blows dont let the process of taking the exams stress you.  I thought I’d scrapped through stage 1, and flunked stage 2 – but discovered I came through with reasonably good scores.

TOGAF Skills Matrix

14 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by in Technology, TOGAF

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My employer is increasingly aligning its architecture team (of which I am a member) to TOGAF. As is the tradition, new year means start reviewing things like personal development plans. So I thought I’d compare my skills base against that of the TOGAF skills framework (http://pubs.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf9-doc/arch/chap52.html).   Now being a bit geeky, I wanted to do the comparison using a spreadsheet rather than print the document and scribble on it – means I can keep a tab on how things progress/change as go.  However I haven’t been able to locate a spreadsheet representation of the HTML/PDF documentation surprisingly, so I knocked one together.  Amusingly I found a couple of colour coding/level errors in the tables of version 8 of TOGAF as provided by the Open Group.

Feel free to use the spreadsheet as you see fit (TOGAF 9.1 Architecture Skills Framework Spreadsheet), obviously within the constraints of the Open Group’s terms.