Content of This Book

The goal of this book is to share insight gathered by industry thought leaders in an easy-to-read and practical style. This book contains many leading-edge examples that illustrate how enterprise architecture can be applied to existing business and technology issues to help one focus on how to think concretely about enterprise architecture while providing solutions to today's problems. The following topics are covered within this book:

• Systems architecture

• Software architecture

• Service-oriented architecture

• Product-line practice

• Methodology

• Enterprise unified process

• Agile architecture

• Agile modeling

  Figure P-3. McGovern/Stevens pentagon for architecture agility.

  

• Presentation tier architecture

• User experience and usability

• Data architecture

• Thought leadership

Authors and readers alike have their own religion when it comes to the best way a given topic should be explained. The examples contained within this book will not be blow-by-blow descriptions of the subjects. There are books better suited for this goal. We shall strictly focus on content that provides an additional value-added experience.

The author team also believes this book is not one to curl up with and read from cover to cover. The topics contained within this book mandate further study and even implementation before they can be fully appreciated.

Audience

This book is suitable for all information technology professionals who have the passion and discipline to study technology to the level required for successful implementation. Ideally, the reader of this book should be a project manager, senior developer, software architect, or enterprise architect employed by a Fortune 1000 organization or by a consulting firm that serves these enterprises. This book is also suitable for such information technology executives as chief information officers (CIO), chief technology officers (CTO), and others within the IT technology management chain.

Since architect is not a title one is granted based merely on the number of years on the job, this author team has intentionally avoided making any references to years of experience in the profession. We assume that the reader has basic familiarity with emerging technologies and their use in solving existing problems. We provide references in Appendix E hat the readers may refer to if they are interested in drilling deeper into any particular topic.