Leveraging BIAN SOA Reference Model in EA

BIAN is the buzzword in the Banking industry in recent times. The testimony to the enormous interest it has generated is the significant number of banking giants that are adopting the BIAN SOA reference model to help drive their large scale business & technology transformation programs. This article is intended as an introduction to BIAN and also depicts how it can be leveraged to develop an EA repository, one of the many other business usages of BIAN.

Hello, I am BIAN

BIAN (Banking Industry Architecture Network) is a not-for-profit organization founded in April 2008. It aims to define SOA in Banking through standardization of IT services. At its core is the Banking Services Landscape that provides a reference Banking Business Architecture model to which the Enterprise IT services realizing corresponding business services should align to. The advantages of using the BIAN SOA model are manifold:    i) Reduction of business information inconsistencies and fragmentation.       ii) Reduction of IT integration costs while leveraging advantages of a service-oriented architecture.       iii) Alignment of business and IT services for reusability & simplification of landscape.  iv) Increased operational flexibility.

The primary assets of BIAN are:

i)   BIAN Service Landscape

ii)  BIAN Metamodel

iii) BIAN Business Scenarios

BIAN community members include leading financial institutions, software vendors & system integrators. TCS is also an active contributor to the BIAN consortium through its BANCS division. GCP BITA has been involved in business architecture work across banks in Norway, Mexico, USA among others.

Developing an EA repository using BIAN assets

The customer’s desire to develop a robust Enterprise Architecture repository is typically driven by the primary intentions of:

·         A shared understanding of business objectives & collaboration between business & IT should drive IT portfolio planning

·         A single view of enterprise business & IT services should drive agility and change related risks

·         A single view of application & infrastructure across business units should drive decisions on investment & reuse

·         Prioritized enterprise business services to develop new model for customer facing application SLA specifications

To realize this vision it is recommended that the customer should adopt a top down approach by assessing & cataloging the current enterprise business services, which will be mapped to information services and then further charted downstream to the corresponding application(s) & underlying infrastructure.

Approach to EA: BIAN model to complement TOGAF in EA

BIAN (Banking Industry Architecture Network) service landscape along with its accompanying metamodel should be used for base lining the customer specific business services and cataloging them. The major advantage this model provides is a service oriented business blueprint that has been built over the years with contributions from the banking industry and IT vendors. The model aims to achieve consistent business service definitions, levels of details & boundaries through SOA led standardization of IT services in banking.

BIAN model is closely aligned with TOGAF 9 ADM. All ADM phases, except for technology architecture (as BIAN model is implementation agnostic), can make use of BIAN’s deliverables to develop the architecture landscape.

BIAN & TOGAF synergy

Developing the EA metamodel

Realizing the customer’s vision necessitates a business service driven EA metamodel. BIAN SOA reference model is the right fit for assessing & developing the Business Architecture as a majority of the customers have embraced TOGAF for all their architecture work. This would allow a prioritization of customer facing services and their application SLA specifications. At the top layer are business services which are derived from service domains in the BIAN service catalog. This layer of repository is recommended to be owned by the customer’s Business group. The business services are realized a layer below by the Information System Services. These IS Services which comprise of process, data & technical level details are in turn realized by corresponding application(s) in the application layer. These two layers are recommended to be owned by IT Managers. Application specific Technology & Software infrastructures are also recorded at the bottom layer of the metamodel. This layer is to be owned by the IT Technical Architecture & Platform Group.

TOGAF ADM

Ownership

EA Metamodel

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High level Physical EA metamodel

Testing the waters

Once the EA metamodel is designed, it is time to test its adaptability within the enterprise through a POC that scopes a few top priority business services for the customer. Business should identify a set of business services which will be used as inputs for the business service cataloging activity. These business services should be mapped to corresponding service domains from the BIAN service landscape, thus forming the first level, L1, of business services. The service domains identified should further be decomposed into high level business services that make up the L2 of business services. Each of the L2 business services are to be realized by Information System Services at L1. These ISSs should be further broken down into high level ISSs at L2 such that these could be directly mapped to existing application(s) that realize the L2 ISSs. Capturing the underlying technical and software infrastructure for each application should follow next but is outside the purview of this exercise.

Sample: Physical Business Service Catalog (this example depicts flow across only one service per level)

Putting it all together

A successful POC’s end result is an EA metamodel using the BIAN business architecture repository that can be successfully implemented across all business units of the customer. The next step is to use the customer’s existing Enterprise Architecture solution or a new solution for EA assessment & development at the enterprise.  The metamodel derived from the above exercise should be imported to the EA solution tool. This is to be followed by capturing of data points in a top down, business services driven approach. The final result is a holistic view of how every business service in the enterprise is realized by an application(s) and the underlying infrastructure. Information services, as always, act as the bridge between the business services and applications layer.

Functionally redundant applications & services across the units will also be identified during this process, remediating these redundancies can not only help boost customer’s RoI but also the operational efficiencies in the long run.

Book Review: Chanakya Neeti

Chanakya Neeti by Chanakya (duh!!) is a one time read. I expected great things from this book, on the lines of 'The Art of War'. However I was let down by the basic tenets posted in this book. Most of the advice in this book is common sense. The bias towards the holier than thou attitude of Brahmins and the way women are treated as carnal objects and troublesome will put many people off from reading this book to the end. These biases may have existed in the times of Chanakya but in the present time these biases are junk.

Movie Review: Death at the Funeral

IMDB: Death at the Funeral (2007)


British comedy at its satirical best. The seriousness of a man's death and his cremation is blown out of proportions and his sons are left to rue their bad luck at all the goof ups at their place.


If you are in a groggy mood or feeling awesome this movie is guaranteed to leave you in stitches. The subtle puns, the plot, the random 'mis'adventures of the family and guests create some memorable scenes in the movie.


A midget, hallucinogenic drugs, homosexuality, sibling rivalry, nudity, and a funeral all come together to deliver a riotous chaotic harmony . 
The films story unfolds in the span of an afternoon and despite the short duration of plot endears us to the characters with witty and realistic dialog. What better setting than a funeral to highlight the humor and irony of life?


My rating 7/10

Dan Brown: The Lost Symbol .... a short literary review

                                                     


After the stupendous success of Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown is back with his next novel: The Lost Symbol. Continue reading for a short review of this epic.

I picked it up from the nearby library last week (I am not a big fan of buying novels for $35 a piece :))  and completed it in 2 nights. Each of its 500 pages was equally riveting and I couldn't resist quickly turning the pages.

The story is set in Washington D.C. and follows Robert Langdon's crusade against Mala'kh's quest for the lost masonic symbol.
Warning: Spoilers ahead.
The novel's protagonist once again saves the world, this time from an evil Mason named Mala'kh. The book revolves around the secret Masonic cult that is committed to maintain the balance of the world. They are the preservers of ancient wisdom, which leads to eternal life. The secret pyramid and the golden talisman protected by the Masons are sought after by Mala'kh who kills, maims, disguises and tricks anybody who comes in his way. Langdon's friend Peter Solomon and his sister Katherine Solomon are the other protagonists in this book. Katherine conducts research on Noetic science and was funded by her brother. As the story unfolds we learn that Mala'kh is actually Peter's son and was considered to be long dead. The tattoo of the phoenix on his body resembles his symbolic rise from the ashes, his return from near death and transformation into a perfect killing machine.
The story contains the usual Dan Brown codes, secrets, tunnels and a grand finale.
This book is a great read but fails to live up to the benchmark set by The Da Vinci Code.

WIKiPhone complete guide to unlocking iPhone OS 3.1.3

I own a 1st generation iPhone I bought nearly 3 years ago and it still runs awesome and have purchased 10 iPhones (3G/3GS) off eBay for many of my friends. My buddies proudly call me 'The Unofficial Apple Marketing executive'. Something to be really proud of eh ?

I'll outline below one of the most popular and easiest unlock + jailbreak of iPhone OS 3.1.3 (All generations):

Please note that this unlock will only work for 04.26.08 baseband. Anything above and you would need to wait until a few days after June 22. That's when OS 4.0 is slated to be released and by then the awesome hacking community should be ready with a working unlock of all bootrooms/basebands on OS 4.0 and below.

You can check your check your baseband (Modem Version) under Settings>General. In the below screenshot you can see the baseband is 2.28.00

Warning: Please stop here if your baseband is anything greater than 04.26.08. iPod Touch users can proceed below.

Download and install the latest version of iTunes from Apple

Step 1. Download sn0wbreeze here.

Step 2. Start Sn0wbreeze and select “Simple Mode”.

Step 3: Sn0wbreeze will now ask you to browse for your .ipsw file. Select the correct 3.1.3 firmware .ipsw file by clicking the “Browse” button. Sn0wbreeze will verify the selected file and then will present you with following screen.

Step 4: Click on "Yes" when Sn0wbreeze asks you “Do you want to activate your iPhone?” for hacktivation. Click on “No” only if you are on an officially supported carrier like AT&T.

Step 5: Sn0wbreeze will now create the custom .ipsw file for your iPhone which will be jailbroken.

Step 6: Now you will have to restore your iPhone to this custom firmware 3.1.3 that you just cooked using Sn0wbreeze for your iPhone. Click on your phone from the sidebar in iTunes and then press and hold left “Shift” button on the keyboard and then click on “Restore” (Not “Update” or “Check for Update”) button in the iTunes and then release the “Shift” button.

This will make iTunes prompt you to select the location for your custom firmware 3.1.3. Select that custom .ipsw file and click on “Open”.

Step 7: Now sit back and enjoy as iTunes does the rest for you. This will involve a series of automated steps. Be patient at this stage and don’t do anything silly. Just wait while iTunes installs the new firmware 3.1.3 on your iPhone. Your iPhone screen at this point will be showing a progress bar indicating installation progress. After the installation is done, iPhone will restart automatically and you should now have a fully jailbroken iPhone running on firmware 3.1.3.

Congrats!! Your iPhone/iPod Touch should be jailbroken now and you should be able to install any application.

2 Steps to unlock iPhone

Step 1

• Start “Cydia” on your iPhone.

• Touch on “Manage” tab on the bottom.

• Now touch on “Sources” as seen in the screenshot below:

• Touch on “Edit” and then on “Add”. You will be prompted to enter a url source as seen in the screenshot below. Type “http://blackra1n.com” and touch on “Add Source”.

Cydia will now automatically update your sources by following a series of automated steps.

• After installation is completed. Search for “blacksn0w” in Cydia and install this application. This app will automatically unlock your iPhone so that you can use it with any carrier.

Step 2: Now simply restart your iPhone. Voila! You are now running a fully unlocked and jailbroken iPhone on firmware 3.1.3 on your iPhone 3G or 3GS.

More info and source can be found at http://www.redmondpie.com/unlock-iphone-3.1.3-3g-3gs-with-blacksn0w/

Enjoy the uber techie's fantasy now.