The Agile Architecture Revolution

A sneak peek at up-and-coming trends in IT, a multidimensional vision for achieving business agility through agile architectures

The Agile Architecture Revolution places IT trends into the context of Enterprise Architecture, reinventing Enterprise Architecture to support continuous business transformation. It focuses on the challenges of large organizations, while placing such organizations into the broader business ecosystem that includes small and midsize organizations as well as startups.
* Organizes the important trends that are facing technology in businesses and public sector organizations today and over the next several years
* Presents the five broad organizing principles called Supertrends: location independence, global cubicle, democratization of technology, deep interoperability, and complex systems engineering
* Provides a new perspective on service-oriented architecture in conjunction with architectural approaches to cloud computing and mobile technologies that explain how organizations can achieve better business visibility through IT and enterprise architecture

Laying out a multidimensional vision for achieving agile architectures, this book discusses the crisis points that promise sudden, transformative change, unraveling how organizations' spending on IT will continue to undergo radical change over the next ten years.

FOREWORD xi
PREFACE xv
PART ONE-Enterprise as Complex System 1
CHAPTER 1 Introducing Agile Architecture 3
Deconstructing Agile 4
Architecting Software/Human Systems 8
Meta Thinking and Agile Architecture 10
Defining Architecture: Worse Than Herding Cats 12
Why Nobody Is Doing Enterprise Architecture 13
Complex Systems: At the Heart of Agile Architecture 16
CHAPTER 2 Shhh, Don't Tell Anyone, but Let's Talk about Service-Oriented Architecture 21
Rumors of SOA's Demise . . . 23
Thinking Outside the SOA Box 26
Okay, So How Did SOA End Up Dead in the First Place? 28
Services: The Core SOA Lesson 31
Implementing Policy-Driven Behavior 34
What's the Deal with Web Services? 38
The Third Conversation 41
Freeing Architecture from the Underlying Infrastructure 44
Implementing SOA without an ESB 47
The SOA Marketing Paradox and the Wizard of Oz 48
CHAPTER 3 Governance: The Secret to Satisfying the Business Agility Meta-Requirement 51
Organizational Context for Governance 52
Architecture-Driven Governance: Beyond IT Governance 54
Rethinking Quality 57
Introducing the Agility Model 60
Meta-Policy Governance 63
Interrelationships among Governance, Quality, and Management 64
Four Stages of Agile Architecture Governance 67
Architecture-Driven Governance and the Butterfly Effect 70
CHAPTER 4 The Enterprise as Complex System 73
Engineering the Enterprise with Complex Systems Engineering 73
Best-Effort Quality and the Agile Architecture Quality Star 76
Best-Effort Quality in Action 80
Resilience: The Flip Side of Agility 83
The Flash Mob Enterprise 86
CHAPTER 5 Agile Architecture in Practice 89
The Composition Vision for IT 90
Vision to Reality: Rethinking Integration 93
Aligning Agile Architecture with BPM 96
Business Modeling and Agile Architecture 98
Processes That Satisfy the Meta-Requirement of Agility 100
PART TWO-The ZapThink 2020 Vision 103
CHAPTER 6 You Say You Want a Revolution . . . 105
Five Supertrends of Enterprise IT 108
Continuous Business Transformation: At the Center of ZapThink 2020 110
Where's Our Deep Interoperability? 112
The Crisis Points of the ZapThink 2020 Vision 113
Big Data Explosion and the Christmas Day Bomber 116
Stuxnet and Wikileaks: Harbingers of Cyberwar 119
Cybersecurity the Agile Architecture Way 125
The Generation Y Crisis Point 128
CHAPTER 7 The Democratization of Enterprise IT 133
Demise of the Enterprise IT Department 134
The Agile Architecture Approach to IT Project Management 136
Crisis Point: The Enterprise Application Crash 138
Replacing Enterprise Software: Easier Said than Done 144
PART THREE-Implementing Agile Architecture 147
CHAPTER 8 Deep Interoperability: Getting REST Right (Finally!) 149
Programmable Interfaces: The Never-Ending Story 150
REST to the Rescue 155
Dogmatic vs. Iconoclastic REST 161
REST vs. Web Services 163
Can REST Fix Web Services? 166
Does REST Provide Deep Interoperability? 168
Where Is the SOA in REST-Based SOA? 170
REST-Based SOA: An Iconoclastic Approach 173
CHAPTER 9 Finally, Let's Move to the Cloud 177
Deja Vu All Over Again 179
Countering Vendor Spin with Architecture 181
Interlude: Neutralizing the Cloud Threat 183
Why Cloud Computing Scares the Platform Vendors 186
Architecting beyond Cloud Computing's Horseless Carriage 187
BASE Jumping in the Cloud: Rethinking Data Consistency 190
Cloud Multitenancy: More than Meets the Eye 193
Keys to Enterprise Public Cloud 197
Why Public Clouds Are More Secure than Private Clouds 200
Why You Really, Truly Don't Want a Private Cloud 202
Avoiding Unexpected Cloud Economics Pitfalls 205
Rethinking Cloud Service Level Agreements 208
Are Your Software Licenses Cloud Friendly? 212
Garbage in the Cloud 214
Beware Fake Clouds 217
Learning the Right Lessons from the 2011 and 2012 Amazon Crashes 219
Failure Is the Only Option 221
Cloud Configuration Management: Where the Rubber Hits the Clouds 223
Clouds, SOA, REST, and State 225
The Secret of a RESTful Cloud 229
BPM in the Cloud: Disruptive Technology 232
Cloud-Oriented Architecture and the Internet of Things 236
Location Independence: The Buckaroo Banzai Effect 238
Postscript: The Cloud Is the Computer 241
CHAPTER 10 Can We Do Agile Enterprise Architecture? 243
Frameworks and Methodologies and Styles, Oh My! 245
The Beginning of the End for Enterprise Architecture Frameworks 248
How to Buy an Agile Architecture 250
The Dangers of Checklist Architecture 253
CONCLUSION 257
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 261
ABOUT THE AUTHOR 265
INDEX 267