Sunday, October 31, 2010

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


        Enterprise architecture - includes the plans for how an organization will build, deploy, use, and share its data, processes, and IT assets

        Enterprise architect - a person grounded in technology, fluent in business, a patient diplomat, and provides the important bridge between IT and the business


            2.  Describe how an organisation can implement a solid information architecture 
  1. List and describe the five requirement characteristics of infrastructure architecture. 

Flexibility- Organisations must watch today’s business, as well as tomorrow’s, when designing and building systems. Systems must be flexible enough to meet all types of business changes

Scalability- Refers to how well a system can adapt to increase demands

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

Availability- Addresses when systems can be accessed by users.

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


  1. Describe the business value in deploying a service oriented architecture 
Service oriented architecture (SOA) is a business-driven IT architectural approach that supports integrating a business as linked, repeatable tasks or services
SOA ensures IT systems can adapt quickly, easily, and economically to support rapidly changing business needs
Using meta data and existing applications, users can re-use applications (services) many times for different tasks, making development cheaper and more flexible

5. & 6. What is an event? What is a service?
 There are two primary parts of web services:
Event is an electronic message indicating that something has happened, it detect threats and opportunities and alerts those who can act on the information
Service – contains a set of related commands that can be re-used, it is more like a software product than they are a coding project

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

Interoperability - is the capability of two or more computer systems to share data and resources, even though they may be made by different manufacturers

Loose coupling - is the capability of services to be joined together on demand to create composite services, or disassembled just as easily into their functional components

Virtualisation - is a framework of dividing the resources of a computer into multiple execution environments

Grid computing - is an aggregation of geographically dispersed computing, storage, and network resources, coordinated to deliver improved performance, higher quality of service, better utilisation, and easier access to data