Chapter 7: Architecting for Competitive Advantage

OVERVIEW

“The architect must be a prophet . . . a prophet in the true sense of the term . . . if he can’t see at least ten years ahead don’t call him an architect.”
Frank Lloyd Wright (1868–1959)

“What business strategy is all about; what distinguishes it from all other kinds of business planning—is, in a word, competitive advantage. Without competitors there would be no need for strategy, for the sole purpose of strategic planning is to enable the company to gain, as effectively as possible, a sustainable edge over its competitors.”
Keniche Ohnae

This chapter introduces the enterprise architecture and discusses how it can be used to create competitive advantage for an organization. We examine the business realities and challenges that have made it so difficult to maintain a coherent enterprise architecture in recent years and how a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), implemented using Web services, can be used to make the enterprise architecture a more achievable and manageable objective.

Finally, we consider the implementation considerations for an enterprise architecture and investigate the relative positions of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and Microsoft .Net as the foundation for implementation elements of an SOA.