I turned in my thesis on November the 1’st, and when to the exam November the 16’Th. And I am happy to say that the result was an A+!!!
I will follow up on this shortly as I need to thank a lot of people. But as I have promised a lot of people that I will now make my thesis available here on my blog!
So don’t hesitate to download it here, and please feel free to comment!
I simply have to quote Dave Welsh for this one:
Business is from Mars, Technology is from Venus.
I believe it says it all. It will be a continual struggle to get these two worlds to come together. It is not impossible, but I think we need a good broker 
EA was an effort to do this from the business perspective, and SOA was an effort to do it with a more technical approach. Will the solution the be SOA - A + EA = SOEA
Just a little update on low level of activity on my blog.
I have been working on writing definitions on the concepts that are used in relation to EA and SOA. This, quite boring, but necessary exercise is fortunately moving towards the end, and I will be publishing my definitions shortly.
One of the reasons that the “definition work” is going a bit slow is because I am also working on a much more interesting project. I have commenced the ambitious task of trying to map SOA into the Zachman Framework! And I must say; I think it looks very promising!
Some of the preliminary results is:
In my view SOA has a great effect on EA. Often I see that the arguments of the A in SOA should be removed, and I am beginning to work with the concept SOEA (SOA - A + EA = SOEA). (and I can see that my thesis instructor might be a little inspired from our last meeting http://gotzespace.dk ).
The reason I remove the A from SOA is because I don’t see it as the same A that is in EA…
And another exiting thing is that the mapping of SOA into the Zachman Framwork may make it possible to omit the “Technology model” and “Detailed Representation”.
I will surely return with more on this later!!
Title: Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture (SOEA)
Supporting the business has always been the purpose of IT. However, in an evermore competitive world the ability to change has become more important than ever. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has often been proclaimed to be the “silver bullet” that can make your IT flexible and support the desired agility of the business. The following quote illustrates how serious this problem is:
“A recent survey of Fortune 500 companies indicated that over 80% had altered their business model in a given two-year period. Two thirds of these - roughly half of the total respondents - claimed that this business change had been constrained by inflexible IT. In a survey by IBM Business Consulting Services, 90% of CEOs expect to transform their enterprise to become more responsive, particularly to customer demand, within the next five years.” [CBDI]
SOA is the natural evolution in software development, enabling a higher level of abstraction, which has made it easier to lift IT to a management level. This higher level of abstraction has lead to conflicting areas between Enterprise Architecture (EA) and SOA. A conflict that need to be approached with caution. But, if solving this conflict it is my claim that SOA and EA will form a synergy enabling the harvesting of the promised effects of both SOA and EA.
Before a conflict can be solved it must be known, and in order to resolve the conflict a common ground must be identified. The purpose of this thesis is to set the first step in this direction by:
Problem summary: Does SOA and EA have a spurious correlation , or is there something causal between the two?