The enterprise architecture you always wanted

Over the years we've seen many systems architecture approaches come and go as we've worked hard in IT to keep up with the pace of business change. While agile delivery methods have helped enormously on a project-by-project basis, enterprise system portfolios remain notoriously resistant to change.

Although we've seen significant progress in the way we analyse and govern enterprise systems through business-aligned SOA, the technology choices we make all too often undermine those efforts. But for almost two decades the enterprise architecture most of us have dreamed of has been sitting in plain sight. The Web has become the world's foremost example of a scalable, resilient, and loosely-coupled system of systems, which are precisely the characteristics we want in enterprise solutions.

In the briefing Dr Jim Webber, ThoughtWorks' agitator behind Guerrilla SOA, showed how the Web wins out by:

• Explaining that enterprise architecture today is mortally wounded by profoundly inappropriate technology choices, which bow to vendor pressure over business imperatives
• Showing that the Web has all of the "ilities" that we demand from enterprise-grade systems, but captured as patterns rather than middleware
• Introducing case studies from recent projects which demonstrate both cost savings and return on investment from using Web-inspired architectures over traditional enterprise middleware

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