The background
1. THE BACKGROUNDReference Models are not strangers to the network communication engineers, they have talk to each other in on the same page with the same protocol. It is critical to have a common reference model to facilitate the communication handshake. The most popular reference model is the Open System Interconnection(OSI) Reference Model.
The following figure illustrate the background of reference model. EA community to overcome the challenge of stovepipe system have adopt the reference model concept from the network communication practice. Initially, the reference model begins from the Technical Reference model to focus on technology at The 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act (CCA), formerly the Information Technology Management Reform Act of 1996(ITMRA). Under this law, federal agencies has established many technical reference models as show on figure. As Enterprise Architecture have evolved for IT centric to business oriented approach, the US government have extend reference model to performance, business, services, data and technology with PRM, BRM, SRM, DRM and TRM. To keep the reference model simple, the group of reference model is consolidated to become the consolidate reference model.
Both the United States government and the British government have invested on architecture classification. The US government establish the Federal Consolidate Reference Model and the British government establish ITIL and Cobit.
EA Reference Models
The problem of learning experiences of the others is the risk of learning from the wrong experiences or reuses the wrong templates. Reference models are created to enable the
architects to learn and reuse the right experiences by establish a common reference point and taxonomy. Coherent EA (www.coherentEA.com) suggest that Reference Models are the fundamental foundation of EA for total participation and learn and reuse experience of the others.
The EA Reference Models are created in EA culture to learn from the experiences of other for reuse and share. The challenge of EA culture is the communication of architecture artifacts. The risk of EA culture is to learn from the wrong experience.
EA reference model is new to the stovepipe culture. It is a very simple concept but very difficult to understand from the aspect of stovepipe culture because there is no need for reference model in the stove pipe culture because every one develop their own solution without learn experiences from each other.
The best way to understand what is a EA reference model, is to come out the box of stove pipe culture. The need of reference model as the way to lean experiences of each other become very clear.
The TRM consists of:
• Service Areas represent a technical tier supporting the secure construction, exchange, and delivery of Service Components. Each Service Area aggregates the standards and technologies into lower-level functional areas. Each Service Area consists of multiple Service Categories and Service Standards. This hierarchy provides the framework to group standards and technologies that directly support the Service Area.
• Service Categories classify lower levels of technologies and standards with respect to the business or technology function they serve. In turn, each Service Category is comprised of one or more Service Standards.
• Service Standards define the standards and technologies that support a Service Category. To support agency mapping into the TRM,
^ TOP