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GCN Home > 04/14/08 issue

Jan Popkin | Enterprise architecture: a journey, not a destination

GCN Interview with Jan Popkin, founder of Popkin Software and a strategist at Telelogic

By Rutrell Yasin

Jan Popkin’s name is synonymous with business process modeling and enterprise architecture. He’s a master at describing and documenting current and desired relationships between information technology and an organization’s business and management processes. He founded Popkin Software, a leading enterprise architecture and business process modeling tool vendor, and was CEO until its acquisition three years ago by Telelogic, a developer of business automation software. Now a strategist at Telelogic, he remains on top of enterprise architecture trends and developments.

GCN: What developments are we likely to see with enterprise architecture this year? Some experts talk about the need for more data management, business processes and security.

Popkin: Enterprise architecture continues to mature. There is an understanding of what it is, and people are saying, “Now that we are doing enterprise architecture, what benefits or actions do we want to result from that?” It’s less, “Should we or shouldn’t we do the program?” [and more] “We’re doing the program now; let’s tune it to our particular needs.”

Enterprise architecture is a mechanism to provide results — whether it’s agility, alignment, collaboration — and so…it is an enabler in itself. I see [users] looking for results, tuning programs. The other part of the enterprise architecture discussion is moving further out from an IT chief architect discussion to involving extended-team collaboration with other groups. And that opens up the questions of data management, business process and security.

For instance, “We have data we want to share — what are the rules for sharing it?” “We provide this process or business service — how can we share it?”

And security is an ongoing discussion. In the past, there has been discussion of laying in a security view. I think that’s always been balanced with having security intrinsic across everything you’re doing and having it especially called out.

GCN: We’re hearing a lot about service-oriented architecture and business process management. How can agencies apply these disciplines and associated technologies in an EA framework?

Popkin: When we talk about an EA framework, I’d like to map that into an EA program. An EA program is an ongoing mechanism to understand what your goals are and what an agency’s service goals are and align that with IT services and business processes. So the enterprise architecture program or framework provides a context to understand the implementation of such a thing as SOA or business process management.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Enterprise Architecture, IT Management



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