Friday, September 24, 2010

Week 6- Enterprise Architectures

What is information architecture and what is information infrastructure and how do they differ and how do they relate to each other?

Information architecture: identifies where and how important information, like customer records, is maintained and secured. A single backup or restore failure can cost an organisation more than time and memory; some data cannot be recreated and the business intelligence lost from that data can be tremendous. Three primary areas an enterprises should focus on :

-Backup & recovery

-Disaster recovery

-Information security

Information infrastructure: includes hardware, software, services and people that when combined provide the underlying foundation to support the organisations goals.



Describe how an organisation can implement a solid information architecture

An organisation can implement a solid information architecture by having a strong information security plan, managing user access and having up to date antivirus software and patched.


List and describe the five requirement characteristics of infrastructure architecture.

Infrastructure architecture includes hardware, software and telecommunications equipment that, when combined, provide the underlying foundation to support the organisations goals.

- Flexibility: systems must be flexible enough to meet all types of business changes. E.g. changing currencies, languages.

- Scalability: how well a system can adapt to increased demands. A number of factors can create organisational growth including market growth including marketing, industry and economy factors.

- Reliability: ensures all systems are functioning correctly and providing accurate information. Reliability in another term for accuracy when discussing the correctness of systems within the context of efficiency IT metrics.

- Availability: (Efficiency IT metrics) addresses when systems can be accessed by users. High availability refers to a system or component that is continuously operational for a desirably long length of time. It typically measured relative to 100% operational or never failing.

- Performance: measures how quickly a system performs a certain process or transaction (in terms of efficiency IT metrics of both speed and throughput). Not having enough performance capacity can have a devastating, negative impact on a business.

Describe the business value in deploying a service oriented architecture

It ensures that IT systems can adapt quickly, easily and economically to support rapidly changing business needs. By using meta data and existing applications, users can re use applications/services many times for different tasks, making development cheaper and more flexible.

What is an event?

Events are the eyes and ears of the business expressed in technology – they detect threats and opportunities and alert those who can act on the information. Pioneers by telecommunication mad financial services companies , this involves using IT systems to monitor a business process for events that mater – a stock out in the warehouse or an especially large charge on a customer’s credit card and automatically alert the people best equipped to handle the issue.

What is a service?

Services are more like software products than they are coding projects. They must appeal to a broad audience and they need to be reusable if they are going to have an impact on productivity. Early forms of services were defined at too low a low level in the architecture to interest the business, such as simple print and save services.

What emerging technologies can companies can use to increase performance and utilise their infrastructure more effectively?

-Interoperability

-eXtensible Markup Language

-Loose Coupling

-Virtualisation

-Grid Computing

Click here to see Week 6 slides:
https://blackboard.nd.edu.au/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_127488_1%26url%3D

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