The LEA Laboratory 

The LEA laboratory is established by the author for many years to develop the Light Enterprise Architecture (LEA) approach.   LEA is developed not only by the theory on paper but it is also a result of many prototype and experiment effort  The prototype are used verify the practicality of the theory. 

The initial purpose of this lab is to overcome the challenge of stealth EA where EA artifacts are embedded inside volumes of documents, large spread sheets and complicate repository.  EA products today have geared toward to empower modeling and analysis capability for the architects and overlook the stakeholders’ need to access the EA knowledge.  While the EA professional may enjoy the complicate spread sheets and hair ball drawing, stakeholder tends to get lost and get very little from their investment return on EA.   In my view, models and analysis tools are productivity tools which is used by EA professional to create products.  In addition to productivity tools , EA need communication tools to convey the EA artifacts to the stakeholders. The LEA lab’s effort is to develop the EA communication tools. It relies on the modeling and analysis tools rather  than a redundant effort.  It is a pity that the EA professional’s hard work gets very little recognition from the community. 

EA is all about people, it requires total participation. It is necessary to define architecture products to enable architecture delivery and communication.  The Department of Defense Architecture Framework has pecified the C4ISR products . However, the products means more to the system and EA professional.  LEA take lightweight approach by adopting the traditional architecture and engineering communication tool – the drawings and deliver the EA products and other information using the state of the art web technologies. 

The LEA laboratory has been the author’s basement hobby shop for many years. It consist of a NT server, web server with an old version of Oracle database. Couple workstations are used as the clients. All the works are prototyped with Front page, ASP over the Oracle database during the past many years since 1999.   Due to the resources limitation, the link to the web site does not use a database.

To review the LEA prototype effort, please review the concept rather than the contents in the prototype.  The prototype is a prove of concept instead of a product.  The content in the prototype are created and collected from many public sources as example only.  In many case, it is the intent to present unreadable drawings to avoid reading too much into the content.  

The Online Technical Reference Manual  Prototype

Future  projects

Interactive  LEA Framework prototype

The purpose is to establish a more efficient approach for the stakeholders to comprehend target architecture design. Traditional EA approach has embed target architecture design in heavy volumes of documents, it requires significant effort to understand the target architecture. The interactive LEA framework enable the stakeholder to access the target architecture based on the LEA framework.  From the interactive LEA architecture framework, the stakeholder can drill down to the subject area and comprehend the specific enterprise wide target architecture.  For example : the enterprise wide architecture design for Local Area Net work.  The interactive LEA framework provide the following capability :

• The top row is the business architecture describe based on the mission, function, information, people, location and workload. 
• The application architecture describe the common application service architecture design with enterprise consideration to support common business function, property, people, location and financing
• The data architecture describe the common data service to serve quality data contents for all applications so that the data is only create and maintain once and use by many.  The data service include the people, organization, property, location and financial information.  It is designed based on enterprise wide consideration to provide quality information for all application use.
• The technology structure describe the common technology infrastructure to support all application and data management need. It include the application technology, the integration technology, the data technology, the security technology, the network technology and the platform technology.

Future  Projects

The LEA Portal Prototype 

LEA portal prototype is a prove of concept effort to disseminate enterprise knowledge to the community.  The prototype is based on the LEA operational framework as described in the LEA approach. It is the gateway for common stakeholder to know the institutional knowledge.  From the portal , the community can access to :

• The current environment to know the information on application systems and the infrastructure
• The stakeholders.
• The EA team in the Office of Chief Information Office.
• Get assistance to know the rules and standard and the compliance processes
• To know the common foundation and building blocks in their subject areas

Future Projects

The e-CIO Prototype

e-CIO is a prototype to support the business of  IT management. It is not a surprise that many IT professional do not recognize IT management as a line of business because they have not yet make the transition from application development culture to Enterprise Architecture culture.  From architecture development point of view, IT management is not a real business. From enterprise architecture point of view, IT management is considered as line of business as suggest in FEAPMO Business Reference Model. It is a line of business as critical  as financial management and others. The consequence in the failure of IT management is no less than the consequence in the failure in financial management. IT professional should give themselves more credit.

Position IT management as a line of business, we can apply the EA principle to analyze the overall IT management function and business process, identify the data architecture and provide automation solution .   As a matter of fact, EA professionals , in the expression of eat your dog food, should apply EA solution to their own business before set out to advice the other line of business.

In this direction, we can see the big picture of IT management line of business in the following figure. It describe that IT management function and process include capital investment, enterprise architecture, project management, life cycle management, governance process and compliance processes and risk management.  The mysterious EA meta data is really the data model  to support IT management function and process. The IT management tools is no longer just a tool, rather it is considered as the application system to support IT management  automation solution.  At this time, most IT management tools are stove pipe oriented, It is essential to apply EA practice to establish an enterprise integrated IT management solution.

 The e-CIO prototype is based on role based approach for different roles in the OCIO to fulfill there responsibility.  It provide different console for different roles in the OCIO office such as the Capital investment console, the Project management console, the life cycle management console. From the role base console, the staff members are able to find out the request for review, the status of the project, the pertinent schedule on the calendar, access to the documents, conduct and track review based on the workflow in the compliance process.

The e-CIO prototype is also considered as the input process to the EA repository.  It has been a challenge to keep the EA repository updated. Without e-CIO, the EA repository requires extra effort to keep it updated. Many EA repository contains old information due to lack of proper resources.   With e-CIO, the EA repository is update during the business process automation in real time.  Keeping the repository update is no longer an issue.

 Future  projects

The LEA Architecture Drawings prototype

Architecture drawings are developed on Visio using a old HP plotter. Unlike traditional architecture office,  IT community are not equipped to handle large size  drawings. The original drawings are developed in architecture size D (36”x24”). After many years of experiment, it is found size C (24”X 18”) is more practical both in production and portability.   The other challenge of large drawings is how to display the drawings for easy access.  To overcome this challenge the author have created a simple but useful drawing display system.

The purpose :   The architecture drawing is an  effort to support the EA communication.

• Serve as a container to pack architecture information for pass around.

• Serve as a EA communication protocol to convey EA information in a explicit manner.

• Enable architecture design certification. Enterprise Architects are reluctant to certify architecture without a clear definition of liability.  Architecture drawings clearly define the architecture design content and enable the possibility of architecture design certification from professional architects.

Future  Projects