Week 6 - Enterprise Architectures

Weekly Questions

What is information architecture and what is information infrastructure and how do they differ and how do they relate to each other?

Information architecture identifies where and how important information, such as customer records, is maintained and secured.

Information infrastructure includes the hardware, software, and telecommunication equipment that, when combined, provides the underlying foundation to support the organisation 's goals.

Companies need to have both information architecture and infrastructure coordinate well with each other in order to achieve or maintain the performance of the companies. They need information architecture to maintain data while infrastructure to provide the hardware and software to support the plans.

E                              Enterprise Architecture

Describe how an organisation can implement a solid information architecture 

An organisation can have a backup and recovery strategy in place.

A backup is an exact copy of a system's information.

Recovery is the ability to get a system up and running in the event of a system crash or failure including restoring the information backup.

An example of this: 

A chain of more than 4000 franchise locations, 7-Eleven Taiwan uploads backup and recovery information from its central location to all its chain locations daily. The company implemented a new technology solution that could quickly and reliably download and upload backup and recovery information. In addition, when a connection fails during the download or upload, the technology automatically resumes the download without having to start over, saving valuable time.

List and describe the five requirement characteristics of infrastructure architecture. 

1. flexibility
2. scalability
3. reliability
4. availability
5. performance

Flexibility

•Able to meet changing business demands

•This might involve multinational challenges

Scalability

•Systems ability to meet growth requirements

•Involves Capacity planning

Reliability

•High Accuracy

•Low Accuracy puts the organisation at risk

Availability

•High availability 99.999% uptime

•Ensures business continuity

Performance

•How quickly a system performs a certain task

•Growing pressure on systems to be faster

Describe the business value in deploying a service oriented architecture 
What is an event? 
What is a service?

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) helps today's businesses innovate by ensuring that IT systems can adapt quickly, easily and economically to support rapidly changing business needs. It helps businesses increase the flexibility of their processes, strengthen their underlying IT architecture, and reuse their existing IT investments by creating connections among disparate applications and information sources.

Event - is an electronic message indicating that something has happened, it detect threats and opportunities and alerts those who can act on the information.

Service - contains a set of related commands that can be re-used, it is more like a software product than they are a coding project.

What emerging technologies can companies can use to increase performance and utilise their infrastructure more effectively?

Grid computing technology.

Grid computing enables the virtualisation of distributed computing and data resources such as processing, network bandwidth, and storage capacity to create a single system image, granting users and applications seamless access to vast IT capabilities. Virtualising these resources yields a scalable, flexible pool of processing and data storage that enterprise can sue to improve efficiency. Moreover, it will help create a sustainable competitive advantage by way of streamlining product development and allowing focus to be placed on the core business. Over time, grid environments will enable the creation of virtual organisations and advanced web services as partnerships and collaborations become more critical in strengthening each link in the value chain.


Textbook: Baltzan, Phillips, Lynch & Blakey, Business Driven Information Systems, 1st Australian/New Zealand ed, chapter 5