Federal agencies see EA value

Federal agencies are starting to acquire and manage enterprise-wide records management systems in a methodical and mature fashion, says FCW.com.

At the AIIM International Exposition and Conference this week, records management employees from the Interior Department, the Internal Revenue Service and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission discussed how they worked with their agencies' enterprise architectures and developed solid business cases so upper managers could easily understand the programs.

Those strategies were key factors in their success in developing content and records management systems.

Perfection shouldn't be the goal for enterprise architects in setting up a service-oriented architecture (SOA), says ADTMag.

A perfect architecture is at best an elusive goal for enterprise architects. Businesses are constantly adapting to meet customers' needs, so what really needs to be achieved with an SOA is business agility. Those were some of the ideas put forth in a Webinar talk by Ian Koenig, senior VP and chief architect of Thomson Financial.

Koenig spoke last Thursday on the topic of "Establishing an SOA Centre of Excellence: Ten Valuable Lessons Learned". The talk was part of a continuing series on SOA governance hosted by The SOA Forum, which has more than 1 600 members. The SOA Forum has been sponsored for about five years by WebLayers, a provider of SOA governance solutions.

Software AG has introduced its webMethods Application Modernisation Suite. The software is designed to bring SOA technology and other improvements to standard mainframe infrastructures, reports ADTMag.

The suite, based on Software AG's Business Infrastructure solutions, is offered in several versions.

The Web Edition features Software AG's webMethods ApplinX component for "low-risk, non-invasive Web enablement". The SQL version offers "real-time, SQL-based access to relational and non-relational data sources...for standards-based mainframe data integration" via the company's ConnecX Adaptors, according to a Software AG announcement.