Practical Architecture in Impractical Times

Matt Valentine
Microsoft Corp.

June 2009

Summary: This article focuses on pragmatic approaches for effectively navigating this new environment and helping architects to become more proficient, capable, and skilled.

Contents

Navigating the Storm
   Business Goals
   Technology Goals
   Infrastructure
   User Goals
   Build Relationships
   Create Fans
Practical Architecture
   Creating New Efficiencies to Reduce Costs
   Finding New Opportunities to Grow the Business
   Helping All Users Increase Productivity
   Connecting People and Teams
   Team-Based Application Development
Conclusion

Navigating the Storm

Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.
ENGLISH PROVERB

For architects, the current economic condition offers an unparalleled opportunity for growth and innovation. The use of sound architectural practices and a strategy focused on efficiency gains and delivering near-term revenue are effective ways to ensure that the contributions of architects are indispensable.

In today’s turbulent economic climate, the immediate reaction might be to cut costs across the board—especially in IT. However, in reality, IT today is so interconnected with operations that such reductions would be counterproductive. In fact, according to McKinsey and Company, a dollar that is invested in IT can have 10 times the impact of traditional cost-reduction efforts.1

Your business customers, partners, suppliers, and employees are going to continue to demand new capabilities—with likely far fewer resources. It is exactly these constraints that offer architects an unparalleled opportunity for growth and innovation.

The fact is that in any economy, innovation is the foundation for success. While there is an overall slowdown in spending, organizations will still need to make smart investments in innovation to help them grow the business. The following are two examples:

• RCA investments in technology during the Great Depression established the company as the leader in TV technology for the next 25 years.
• During the Great Depression, Sears shifted its business model from catalogs to retail stores and became the largest retailer in the United States for the next 50 years.

Architects are generally accustomed to driving alignment between IT and business requirements. While much architecture work is strategic—focused on achieving a specific goal or business advantage—in today’s economic climate, now is not the time to embark on risky and expensive business-reengineering efforts. In fact, the primary finding from the Gartner Business Executive Survey, 2009, is that “most leadership teams will reduce their focus on longer-term issues.”2 As a result, the key to surviving the economic downturn is to intensify opportunities to produce near-term revenue and efficiency gains.

Effective architecture seeks to align business and technical requirements by shared understanding of system design by balancingbusiness, technology (or system), and user goals.3 Before detailing some practical projects, let us quickly review some valuable architectural techniques and practices that are particularly suited to current economic conditions.

Business Goals

Maintain Focus on the Business

If you have a job without aggravation, you don’t have a job.
MALCOLM FORBES

In the current economic environment, the ability of an architect to drive alignment between IT and business has never been more critical. While much has been written on this topic, here are a few things to remember:

• There is no better way to look forward than to stay focused on customers, both internal and external.
• The unfortunate reality is that few business leaders understand the value that IT delivers; therefore, it critical to focus on projects that contribute meaningfully to the success of the enterprise.
• The value of an IT department is directly proportional to the usefulness of the information that it produces.4
• Using the Pareto principle as a guide, identify and address the 20 percent of the causes that result in 80 percent of the effects: revenue, bugs, downtime, business processes, and so on.
• Keep in mind the advice of Dale Carnegie: “When dealing with people, remember that you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but of emotion.”
• The enemy of good is perfect—also known as Cosby’s Law: “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone.”

Take an Agile Approach

Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON

By applying an agile development methodology to all projects—in which work is performed in small, rapid increments with minimal planning, and is aligned closely with customer needs and company goals—change can be managed more easily. The result will be finite, manageable projects that have a clear connection to the business.

“The agile community taught us the idea of test-drivendevelopment, where you define the test, write enough codefor the test to run green, and then simplify the code through refactoring—making sure that the tests continue to run green. This thinking can very much apply to IT in the large, where you adopt a Lean mindset and focus on quickly delivering projects that increase flow—value for the customer, then simplifying and reducing waste through consolidation.”
SAM GUCKENHEIMER, GROUP PRODUCT PLANNER, MICROSOFT VISUAL STUDIO TEAM SYSTEM AND AUTHOR OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING WITH VISUAL STUDIO TEAM SYSTEM

Use Well-Known Patterns

The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.
WILLIAM JAMES

The ability to identify recurring patterns quickly and take action— whether in sports, business or architecture—has long been a hallmark of effective leaders. From an architectural perspective, patterns provide a reusable solution to commonly occurring problems— whether business or technology:

• Industry patterns, including customer service in retail banking, mass-assembly manufacturing systems, and emergency response services in government
• Technology patterns, including data warehousing, service-oriented architecture, and e-commerce Web sites
• Collaboration patterns, including running effective meetings, brainstorming, and architectural-design sessions

Now is not the time to build a better mousetrap; therefore, leverage resources such as Patterns & Practices5, Microsoft Operations Framework6, Solution Accelerators7, and the MSDN Architecture Center8 to accelerate solution delivery, drive cross-team alignment, increase predictability, mitigate risk, and increase productivity that results in better alignment with business.

Technology Goals

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishablefrom magic.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE

Businesses are complex systems of people, processes, and technology, and this complexity is not without cost. In fact, according to a recent survey by Bain & Company of executives at 960 companies from around the world, nearly 70 percent reported that complexity was driving up costs and hindering growth.9

Systems thinking10 and Dr. Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints11 have taught us that system performance depends on how parts interact, and not on how they work separately. Therefore, taking a holistic approach and minimizing the friction between processes can be more effective than addressing each subsystem individually.

“We find that it is simplest to focus on just a few vendors and, ideally, one if they can provide the best holistic integrated environment. Our studies show that this reduces the time for service implementation by 50 percent and [provides] a reliability/productivity boost overall.”
STEPHEN IBARAKI, FCIPS, I.S.P., MVP, DF/NPA, CNP

As a result, organizations are converging what were once disparate, standalone applications and systems into integrated, unified application platforms in order to better to support their business applications. While no strict definition of “application platform” exists, these software systems essentially consist of an integrated and interoperable set of IT infrastructure, business applications, and tools for application development.

Infrastructure

Core infrastructure provides fundamental, foundational capabilities for supporting IT operations—for example, identity and access management, desktop-device and server management, security and networking, and data protection and recovery.

In general, these “utility” capabilities do not provide a competitive advantage to the business. Therefore, the focus should be on driving new efficiencies to reduce costs.

Applications

Business applications are generally how users experience IT. Applications provide people with access to data and processes that they need to do their jobs—making decisions, understanding their customers, managing operations, and so on.

Whether business applications are packaged, custom-developed, run on premises, or hosted in external data centers, they can have a profound impact on the business. As a result, strategic investments in business application can help the business differentiate effectively and result in competitive advantages.

Tools

Use of application-development tools and frameworks to build highly specialized business applications can improve the ability to outperform competitors. A homegrown data-analysis engine that identifies high-value segments and audiences, or an automated business process that enables an organization to deliver products and services more quickly, is an example of how custom application development can provide a competitive advantage.

Organizations need powerful, flexible tools and skills that support a wide range of application types and architectural styles. The greater the flexibility of the development platform, the greater the benefit to the business.

While optimizing disparate applications and subsystems—such as tuning a database, profiling the performance of an application, or increasing load on a Web site—can result in local efficiencies, the biggest benefits come from taking a holistic approach to improving how infrastructure, applications, and tools work together to support critical business applications.

User Goals

Users ultimately decide the success and failure of any IT project. Therefore, a pragmatic approach must stay focused on users—both internal and external.

Customer-Connected Engineering

Many projects fail to deliver on promises and meet the requirements of users. According to a well-publicized report from The Standish Group, only one out of three projects is a success, and 66 percent of projects fail or take longer than expected.12

IT and custom application-development projects can be complex and, thus, risky endeavors. To mitigate this risk, it is important for projects to leverage customer-connected engineering, scenario- driven development, and agile development methodologies that rely on frequent check-ins with the business to ensure that IT projects do not end in spectacular failures.

“I’ve talked to many companies that have implemented stunningly beautiful SOA infrastructures that support managed communications using virtualized proxies anddynamic bindings. They’ve deployed the best technology the industry has to offer, including registries, repositories, SOA management, XML gateways, and even the occasional ESB. Many have set up knowledge bases, best practices, guidance frameworks, and governance processes. And yet these SOA initiatives invariably stall out.The techies just can’t sell SOA to the business. They have yet to demonstrate how all this infrastructure yields any business value.”
ANNE THOMAS MAINES, VICE PRESIDENT AND RESEARCH DIRECTOR, BURTON GROUP13

Build Relationships

The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows.
ARISTOTLE ONASSIS

User scenarios and use cases help architects understand the necessary requirements, but nothing beats building deep relationships and understanding of your customers—both internal and external. In addition to technical experience, highly effective architects have a deep understanding of the business and industry issues and, given their ability to relate to both groups, are actively sought out for their expertise.

Create Fans

If we don’t take care of our customers, someone else will.
ANONYMOUS

It is not enough to deliver on time, on budget, and to specification. Users increasingly want more capabilities in their business applications. They want more flexibility, easier access, collaboration, and better productivity from their applications. By delivering business applications that exceed expectations, you not only create fans for your work, but also improve the ability of people to advance the business.

Figure 1. Pragmatic opportunities to apply crosscutting techniques and practices (Click on the picture for a larger image)

Practical Architecture

In the previous section, we reviewed valuable crosscutting techniques and practices that can help architects navigate the current economic conditions. Now, let us look at some pragmatic opportunities to apply these best practices, including:

• Creating new efficiencies to reduce costs.
• Finding new opportunities to grow the business.
• Helping all users increase productivity.

Creating New Efficiencies to Reduce Costs

Infrastructure Optimization

Driving lower expenses through continuous IT consolidation and optimization is more important than ever. Capability maturity models and enterprise frameworks such as the Zachman Framework14, The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF)15, or Microsoft’s own Core Infrastructure Optimization16 model can be effective architectural approaches for driving down IT costs.

Two major opportunities for driving down costs are data and server management:

• With automated server virtualization, deployment, and security processes of data-management servers, IT organizations can lower costs and increase per-server FTE efficiency. A Microsoft- sponsored study shows that organizations that operated at the highest level of performance incurred 63 percent lower per-server operations costs and managed approximately three times more servers per administrator than those that operated at basic levels.17
• Server virtualization enables organizations to reduce their hardware footprint, save on the cost of utilities, and (where systems management is used) reduce IT labor costs. These savings are reflected in an annual $2,300 per-server difference in IT labor costs in organizations that adopt the practice, compared to those that do not.17

In addition to reducing costs, an optimized IT infrastructure can enable quicker response to changing business needs:

“Compared to multiple, single-instance deployments of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, using the multitenant capability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers lower startup costs. Previous deployment times ranged from weeks to months, depending on internal requirements. Having a proven production environment eliminated this time, and now we’re able to spin-up instances in as little as five minutes.”
MARK BACIAK, PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT, MICROSOFT CORPORATION18

With the emergence of cloud technologies that promise capacity on demand, the opportunity exists to shift away from expensive hardware capital expenditures (CAPEX) to operating expenses (OPEX) that are based on elastic capacity needs.

Reducing Friction Between Business Processes

Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
HENRY FORD

Effective architecture can help drive down operational costs through improved business-process flow, automation, management, and optimization.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a popular strategy for designing solutions that might require integration across operating systems, applications, and databases. A service-oriented approach can unlock the value of existing systems and improve cost efficiency and overall business agility. The key to success with SOA is to focus on practical applications of service-orientation instead of expensive, mega-scale business-process reengineering efforts.

To support customer support requests for the growing Xbox, Xbox360, and Zune products, architects at the Microsoft Entertainment and Devices (E&D) division have focused on practical approaches for reusing existing systems to minimize the need to create expensive new applications. By taking an agile, service-oriented approach, E&D has been able to increase scale and data consistency quickly and improve process transparency—resulting in improved process flow, customer satisfaction, and customer service–agent productivity.

“The economic condition has intensified our existing methodologies for driving business value. Using a practical approach to architecture and a focus on continuous improvement, we’re using value-stream mapping—a Lean approach—to improve flow, eliminate waste, and reduce latency.
“By having a service-oriented integration layer, we were able to streamline our outsourced repair logistics processes, which reduced costs by as much as $3M a month; and, by creating new services based on BizTalk rules that capture entitlements and eligibility information, we’re seeing a ton of agility and adaptability value—about a half-million a month in savings.”
MIKE HATCH, PRINCIPAL SOLUTION ARCHITECT, MICROSOFT E&D DIVISION

In late 2004, EDS, an HP Company, began a project to help airlines extend the life and value of existing IT systems, take more advantage of outsourcing options, and improve competitive advantage. Using a service-oriented approach that is based on Microsoft technologies, EDS Airline SOA is a flexible and efficient transaction-processing platform that provides middleware, messaging, and security capabilities for more than 20 applications that provide key airline services and functionality—including reservations, flight planning, and flight operations.

By using a service-oriented approach, EDS extends the life of existing IT infrastructure while proactively retiring outdated systems. EDS also pulls functionality from TPF and other legacy systems and migrates those applications to a Microsoft platform that is easier and less expensive to maintain. The results of this project include savings of between 10 and 25 percent on new services, the ability to execute a legacy modernization strategy more rapidly, and a nearly 30 percent lower total cost of ownership versus mainframe.19

“To help reduce costs and streamline airline operations, we took a pragmatic approach to SOA. We focused on systematically decoupling and then shifting application workloads from expensive, inflexible legacy systems to more agile and cost- efficient systems. Today, the system in production provides high reliability and performance—over 1.2 billion transactions per year—at lower cost. We expect to be able to make changesto the reservation system in a few weeks, where before it took several months.”
MIKE MELTON, TRANSPORTATION GROUP CHIEF TECHNOLOGIST, EDS, AN HP COMPANY

From a data perspective, by reducing the number of required steps from 19 to 9, automating 70 percent of its business-intelligence requests, and providing Microsoft Office Excel as the user interface, Lloyds TSB—a leading financial-services group—was able to reduce the time for critical business reports from months to minutes, which provided significant efficiency gains for the business.20

Finding New Opportunities to Grow the Business

Increase Customer Focus

You can close more business in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.
DALE CARNEGIE

Information is at the core of a business’s ability to make effective decisions. Architecture initiatives that increase the quality, timeliness, and usefulness of information have a direct correlation to increased revenue. A practical approach is to focus on anticipating the needs of your customers—both internal and external—because they are the key to growth. Typical customer queries include the following:

• Which customers are the most profitable? Least?
• Which customers have the highest potential for growth? Least?
• Which customers are at risk for leaving for the competition?
• What are the primary customer-satisfaction issues?
• Which types of customers do we wish we had more of?

While disconnected data can provide usable customer insights, the combining of data from different systems and business units is likely to produce a more comprehensive and valuable customer view.

Lloyds TSB is a great example. By providing their business analysts with integrated access to disparate data stores, including their 40 TB Teradata Warehouse, Lloyds TSB increased their understanding of the spending behaviors of customers in order to maximize the value of the services that they offer.

“We wanted to create a single version of the truth by consolidating all of our BI applications and islands of information into a new set of technologies that would makeit easy for analysts and end users to access the data that they needed to gain actionable insight that they could share with their colleagues.”
MATT SHERRIFF, DATA WAREHOUSE DEVELOPMENT AND BI MANAGER, CUSTOMER VALUE MANAGEMENT, LLOYDS TSB20

A practical approach to information architectures starts with flexible and versatile Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) and data- integration capabilities that can quickly combine data from a variety of operational data stores, data marts, and data warehouses. The next step is to provide the business with self-service capabilities for information access and analysis, which include:

• Decision-support systems that help everyone in the organization to make better customer decisions.
• Data-mining capabilities that uncover new data relationships and help predict future customer trends, such as revenue, satisfaction, and churn.
• Data-visualization capabilities that increase the usability of customer information through graphical and visual means.
• Flexible reporting capabilities that include pivoting, drill-down, and linking, which enable people to create and manage their own real-time reports.

By providing the business with a flexible data-integration architecture and self-service data-analysis capabilities, it is possible not only to create deep customer insights, but also reduce the backlog on IT and increase the timely flow of information through the organization.

Improve Operational Insight

Beware of little expenses: A small leak will sink a ship.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

With a flexible information architecture, businesses can improve performance management, reduce risk exposure, identify sources of revenue leakage, eliminate inefficiencies, and recognize and realize new growth opportunities.

Performance-management solutions include:

• Scorecards and dashboards that monitor and measure process effectiveness and chart progress towards strategic business objectives.
• Key Performance Reporting that displays metrics to track personal and team performance and drive accountability in the organization.
• Business-initiative monitoring that collects and distributes information that illustrates the effectiveness of business initiatives.

In Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), Microsoft relied on local subsidiaries to feed sales data into a proprietary application that lacked the functionality to produce sales forecasts. Microsoft implemented a performance-management solution that enabled employees to create and share sales forecast graphs and tables quickly, in real time, across portal sites. As a result, sales forecast accuracy and revenues for the group have increased 31 percent.21

An effective Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) architecture, or the real-time monitoring of business activities, gives organizations the ability to track business processes from a variety of tools, including Web services, Web portals, Office Excel, other desktop clients, and mobile devices. This provides an increased level of visibility into critical processes that drive revenue or—when they malfunction—that do not.

ASB Group Investments—a default provider for the New Zealand government’s retirement savings program, KiwiSaver—uses BAM to reconcile the financial totals of all contributions against a batch total that is received daily.

“[By using BAM], we can define and track key performance indicators throughout the process of receiving and managing KiwiSaver contributions. A critical aspect of being an institutional participant in this program is visibility into the process.
“If something goes wrong, we can use the BAM functionality to drill down and find out what happened. This is extremely helpful. Now, we have the tools to locate and fix problems quickly.”
ROBERT MAHER, TEAM LEADER OF THE MIDDLEWARE STREAM, STRATEGY AND ARCHITECTURE, ASB TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

Helping All Users Increase Productivity

Deliver User-Focused Applications

It is no use saying, “We are doing our best.” You have to succeed in doing what is necessary.
WINSTON CHURCHILL

People are at the core of business. It is their creativity, innovation, collaboration, and passion that drive a business to succeed. Helping people communicate, collaborate, be more productive, and make better decisions should top the list of practical architecture projects.

To help engineers improve productivity, Honeywell Transportation Systems designed and developed a system in only four months to integrate SAP information into familiar Microsoft Office tools.

“SAP is critical to our business, especially to our supply-chain and manufacturing organizations. But not all of our engineers are SAP power users. SAP is a very transactional system,and engineers are not used to it, because they don’t use it continuously as our supply-chain workers do. Every time they accessed an SAP part number, it required multiple clicks, which amounted to several hours per week.
“By using smart tags, we were able to reduce two to three minutes’ worth of work that only a limited number of people knew how to do to a single mouse-click that everyone can do.
It represents a tremendous efficiency gain across the company,lets our engineers take full advantage of the investment we’ve made in SAP and MatrixOne, and broadens access to information.”
JERRY IBRAHIM, DIRECTOR OF IT EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES, HONEYWELL TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS22

Historically, users have worked on their PCs (or terminals) to access monolithic business applications. Today, users are operating a wide range of devices. Inside their organizations, they are using a desktop PC; on the road, they carry a laptop; they are connecting to the Internet through a variety of devices; and they often do work at home by using their PCs.

To deliver applications that are accessible from a wide range of presentation technologies—desktop, Web, RIA, portal, and devices— architects must design multichannel architectures by using loosely coupled, independently evolvable pieces that are facilitated by flexible development frameworks and tools that support a wide range of application types and architectural styles, as well as connected and disconnected scenarios.

“The more relevant we are to our customers, the more they will appreciate it, and the more likely it is that they will stay with us. We are driven by what our customers expect from us andknow that if we offer more dynamic and more efficient channels for interaction, our relationship with our customers will be strengthened.”
PATRICK CHEW, HEAD OF DELIVERY, CONSUMER FINANCIAL SERVICES, OCBC BANK23

The Architectural Journal #1024 focuses on composite applications, and the recent patterns & practices release, “Composite ApplicationGuidance for WPF and Silverlight,” is designed to help you more easily build enterprise-level applications that span multiple delivery channels and presentation technologies.

Connecting People and Teams

None of us is as smart as all of us.
KEN BLANCHARD

In today’s highly interconnected world, it is not uncommon for people and teams across separate organizations, companies, and even countries to come together to deliver business results.

For architects, this means creating effective collaboration-oriented architectures25 that help people create, distribute, analyze, and share information by using a combination of on-premise and off-premise software and services. This de-parameterization—characterized by systems that span organizations, systems, networks, and security domains26 —presents a variety of new and interesting considerations.

A practical approach focuses on increasing the productivity of distributed people and teams by simplifying the access to shared information. Key focus areas include:

• Integrated communications that unify e-mail, instant messaging, voice mail, telephones, mobile devices, and Web conferencing into a single experience.
• Collaborative workspaces that allow people to create and manage collaboration spaces and access them from multiple tools: e-mail, phone, Web conferencing, portals, and productivity applications.
• Locating information and people across multiple information sources and organizations.
• People-driven processes that enable unstructured and ad-hoc business processes to connect with automated business processes.

Capgemini, one of the leading consulting firms in the world, wanted to bring its people and knowledge together globally to form highly efficient teams that could access information quickly to win new business and complete projects productively. By improving access to critical information, experts, and colleagues, thus reducing delays and increasing productivity, Capgemini teams can respond to new opportunities faster and have increased their new business close rate. The ability to win business and work smarter and faster is expected to result in a payback of eight months and a net present value per user of more than $2,700 USD.27

Team-Based Application Development

It’s easy to get good players. Getting them to play together, that’s the hard part.
CASEY STENGEL

Custom business applications that result in the ability to outperform competitors can result in a competitive advantage. As a result, increasing the predictability, repeatability, and measurability of team- based application-development processes is as critical as optimizing such traditional business operations as manufacturing, inventory, and production.

By reducing the friction between development roles—architect, analyst, designer, developer, and tester—businesses can expect to increase productivity, as well as deliver more stable, secure, and scalable business applications. A practical approach to team-based software development uses a Lean approach that focuses on:

• Improvement of the flow of value to the organization by reducing risk, increasing business visibility into the development process, and improving the ability to meet the needs of the business.
• Reduction of waste by eliminating unnecessary code, optimizing processes, shortening development cycles, and avoiding unnecessary complexity.

“A Lean approach to software engineering thinks end-to-end about the optimal flow of value and the continual reduction of waste. Let me give you an example: One of the most difficult problems has always been bugs that can’t be reproduced:the ‘no-repro’ bug. By eliminating this waste through better tooling and processes, we can build a better bridge between development and test.”
SAM GUCKENHEIMER, GROUP PRODUCT PLANNER, MICROSOFT VISUAL STUDIO TEAM SYSTEM AND AUTHOR OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING WITH VISUAL STUDIO TEAM SYSTEM

EDS, a global business- and technology-services company, realized a 286 percent ROI in four months by using Microsoft Visual Team System to support a more efficient global development strategy and realign its internal software-development assets.28

Over six months, Dell—a leading manufacturer of PCs and technology-related products—realized a 225 percent ROI by deploying a centralized global source-code management platform to provide developers with source code on a just-in-time basis, regardless of their location. Improved source-code management has also enabled Dell to consolidate its source code onto fewer servers, redeploy 100 system administrators, and improve the productivity of its developers.29

Conclusion

You may delay, but time will not.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Today’s turbulent business climate creates interesting challenges for architects who are responsible for reducing costs and delivering new capabilities. A practical approach to architecture focuses on:

• Balancing business, technology, and user goals with the goal of delivering near-term revenue and efficiency gains.
• Taking a holistic approach that reduces the complexity of how infrastructure, applications, and tools work together to support critical business applications.

The Microsoft Application Platform, which provides all of the capabilities that this article covers, is an integrated and interoperable set of mission-critical server infrastructure, applications, and tools that helps organizations to reduce operations costs, improve business flexibility, and increase productivity for all—developers, users, and administrators. More information, visit the Microsoft Application Platform Web site.

References

1. http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Business_Technology/BT_Strategy/Managing_IT_in_a_downturn_Beyond_cost_cutting_2196
2. http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=920217(subscription/purchase required)
3. http://apparchguide.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx
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5. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/practices/bb190351.aspx
6. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/solutionaccelerators/dd320379.aspx
7. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/solutionaccelerators/default.aspx
8. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/default.aspx
9. http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02/en/common/item_detail.jhtml;jsessionid=300XUPXY2GWQIAKRGWDSELQBKE0YIISW?id=U0808A&referral=2341
10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_thinking
11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints
12. http://www.projectsmart.co.uk/docs/chaos-report.pdf
13. http://apsblog.burtongroup.com/2008/03/looking-for-soa.html
14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zachman_framework
15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOGAF
16. http://www.microsoft.com/infrastructure/about/overview.mspx
17. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=F190007A-B46A-48CA-9703-F5110B8BA0FB&displaylang=en
18. http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000002874
19. http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/7/0/a70394d4-164b-47e3-906d-71275b6b6ae3/EDS%20and%20Microsoft%20WP_SOA%20in%20the%20Airline%20Industry.pdf
20. http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/8/E/38E37AF9-A6AC-429B-8AE7-FF83C600A75B/LloydsTSB_BI_Final.doc
21. http://www.microsoft.com/asia/partnersolutionmarketplace/philippines/CaseStudyDetail.aspx?casestudyid=201248
22. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/bb266330.aspx
23. http://www.opengroup.org/jericho/COA_v1.0.pdf
24. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-perimeterisation
25. http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/D/1/AD1BB687-C475-41B0-925C-084E394C3299/collaboration_vision_white_paper.doc
26. http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=201353

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Sam Guckenheimer, J.D. Meier, Mike Hatch, Lynn Langit from Microsoft, and Clyde Keeling at EDS for their help and subject-matter expertise.

About the Author

Matt Valentine (mattva@microsoft.com) joined Microsoft in 2003 to focus on helping customers address business challenges by using world-class distributed-computing technologies. He has over 15 years of experience in architecting and delivering application, database, Web, and transaction systems solutions with major corporations, including AT&T, IBM, ATG, and Microsoft. Key distributed-application projects have included telecommunications OSS projects, distributed insurance solutions, and several of the world’s largest travel e-commerce sites. Matt holds a BS in Computer Science from Bucknell University and works on the Application Platform Marketing team at the Microsoft world headquarters in Redmond, WA.