Chicago Architects Group - September Meeting

Enterprise, Solution, and Infrastructure architects are the hearts of their businesses. We each try to make sense of the landscape that is our business and form order out of chaos. We do this with knowledge and experience.

The Chicago Architects Group is founded with the goal to unite architects into a community for collaboration and knowledge sharing. The group is for people to meet their peers and share some stories and ideas.

The Chicago Architects Group encourages everyone with an interest in technical architecture to join us for our next meeting on Thurs, August 21st at the downtown CDW office.

Refreshments are supplied and bring your thoughts and questions. Attendance is without cost.

Chicago Architects Group - Thurs, September 25th
Microsoft Corporation
3025 Highland Pkwy.
Suite 300
Downers Grove, Il 60515

Presentation :
Presentation at 6:00pm, doors open at 5:30pm

Constraints for an Integrated Enterprise
by Raja Gangavarapu

>Summary

In the book “The goal” by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, the author demonstrated a simple yet very powerful solution to a very common problem in Supply Chain. He demonstrated the dilemma through a Scout Master, who is trying to speed up his scouts through a very narrow pathway where all the scouts are going in a line. The problem is due to one of the boys, Herbie, was over-sized and out of shape. Herbie is unable to maintain the pace along with other kids. The scout master tried all the options by putting Herbie at the beginning, in the middle and finally at the end of the line. Irrespective of the position, he always slowed the group down. As time passed by it got worst as Herbie had to stop to take a break (aka, systems crash). The author used Herbie to illustrate his “Theory of Constraints” which is simply a process for finding the constraints that hinder progress, break the constraint, and go back to finding the constraints again

There are always Herbies in any environment, particularly in the integrated and ’onDemand’ Information Technology world. The required agility and necessity to meet and exceed business expectations, raises a need to have an effective process to identify the constraints and eventually solve them, preferably before they show up.

The “Integration Architecture Framework” is developed to address

· How to identify these constraints and
· How to analyze and
· Eventually how to resolve them in any IT system design and solution implementation.

This framework is developed as a guide on how to develop a comparative analysis, which is repetitive, between what any organizations in general capture/gather at each stage of their Methodology and the new Constraints that are to be addressed at each stage. The (potential) solutions that are required to address these constraints are out of scope for this presentation.

Followed by open forum