José Barateiro

Manage Risks through the Enterprise Architecture

The goal of Risk Management activities is to define prevention and control mechanisms to address the risks attached to specify activities and valuable assets. Many Risk Management efforts operate in silos with narrowly focused, functionally driven, and disjointed activities. That fact leads to a fragmented view of risks, where each activity uses its own language, customs and metrics. The lack of interconnection and holistic view of risks limits an organization-wide perception of risks, where interdependent risks are not anticipated, controlled or managed. In order to address the Risk Management interoperability and standardization issues, this paper proposes an alignment between Risk Management, Governance and Enterprise Architecture activities, providing a systematic support to map and trace identified risks to enterprise artifacts modeled within the Enterprise Architecture, supporting the overall strategy of any organization. We discuss the main relationships between Risk Management and Enterprise Architecture and propose an architecture to integrate risks concerns into the overall organization environment.

Modeling digital preservation capabilities in enterprise architecture

The rising awareness of the challenges of preserving information over the long term has led to a wealth of initiatives developing economic models, methods, tools, systems, guidelines and standards for digital preservation. The challenge of digital preservation is to assure that information nowadays coded and stored in digital formats can be read and be used in an unforeseen future. This is an interdisciplinary problem combining organizational and technical challenges. However, to date there is no unified view on how to approach the problem from a holistic perspective and align organizational and technical issues in a systems engineering approach. Organizations that aim to add digital preservation to their abilities generally have difficulties to assess their existing systems and what capabilities and components they are missing in order to address the needs of trustworthy information longevity. In this paper we present an approach that enables us to accommodate the concerns of digital preservation in Enterprise Architecture practice. We discuss key elements of a generic reference architecture for digital preservation and a capability model based on established domain-specific reference models. Distilling these knowledge sources into a consistent and coherent view allows baseline assessment and incremental capability development in typical IT governance scenarios where an IT architecture already exists. We illustrate this with the assessment of a government agencys existing capabilities and systems against emerging digital preservation requirements.

Analysis of Federated Enterprise Architecture Models

Enterprise architecture models support decision-making as they help organizations to understand, communicate and analyse how business processes are performed, the goals they achieve, the information they use, as well as the applications that realize the business, and the supporting technological infrastructure. The integrated analysis of these models is not straightforward because it cross-cuts different domains that are described using heterogeneous concepts. This paper explores the application of ontologies to analyse enterprise architecture models. Ontologies represent knowledge that can be analysed using computational inference. The contributions of this paper are (1) the specification of multiple enterprise architecture models as ontological schemas, (2) the integration of ontological schemas, and (3) the analysis of the integrated models. The solution artefact consists of a federated model specified as a set of ontological schemas described in OWL-DL that integrates multiple enterprise models and assists their analysis using computational inference. The paper demonstrates the application of the federated model to the ArchiMate language as a means to assess the compliance of business requirements in a civil engineering scenario.

Preserving digital data in heterogeneous environments

Digital preservation aims at maintaining digital objects accessible over a long period of time, regardless of the challenges of organizational or technological changes or failures. In particular, data produced in e-Science domains could be reliably stored in todays data grids, taking advantage of the natural properties of this kind of infrastructure to support redundancy. However, to achieve reliability we must take into account failure interdependency. Taking into account the fact that correlated failures can affect multiple components and potentially cause complete loss of data, we propose a solution to evaluate redundancy strategies in the context of heterogeneous environments such as data grids. This solution is based on a simulation engine that can be used not only to support the process of designing the preservation environment and related policies, but also later on to observe and control the deployed system.

On the relevance of enterprise architecture and IT governance for digital preservation

Digital Preservation has been recognized as a key challenge in providing trusted information and sustainable eGovernment services. However, there has been little convergence on aligning the technically oriented approaches to provide longevity of information in ever-changing technology environments, and the organizational problems that public bodies are facing, through a systematic framework that aligns organizational and technological issues in the social domain of eGovernment. In this paper, we discuss the relevance of Enterprise Architecture and IT Governance for digital preservation and analyze key frameworks for digital preservation from this viewpoint. We assess the coverage of the leading criteria catalog for trustworthy repositories in terms of Enterprise Architecture dimensions and in how far these criteria align with established Enterprise Architecture and IT Governance frameworks. We discuss the analysis process we were following and present key observations that result from our work. These point to a number of steps that should be taken in order to consolidate digital preservation approaches and frameworks and align them with established frameworks and best practice models in Enterprise Architecture and IT Governance.

Challenges on preserving scientific data with data grids

The emerging context of e-Science imposes new scenarios and requirements for digital preservation. In particular, the data must be reliably stored, for which redundancy is a key strategy. But managing redundancy must take into account the potential failure of component. Considering that correlated failures can affect multiple components and potentially cause a complete loss of data, we propose an innovative solution to manage redundancy strategies in heterogeneous environments such as data grids. This solution comprises a simulator that can be used to evaluate redundancy strategies according to preservation requirements and supports the process to design the best architecture to be deployed, which can latter be used as an observer of the deployed system, supporting its monitoring and management.

Digital Preservation of Scientific Data

Digital preservation aims at maintaining digital objects and data accessible over long periods of time. We propose the use of dedicated or surplus storage resources of data grids to build frameworks of digital preservation. In this paper we focus on the problem of digital preservation in two scenarios: a national digital library and a repository of scientific information for dam safety. We detail the scenario of dam safety data and provide an analysis of an existing data grid solution that can be used for this purpose.

Securing the iRODS metadata catalog for digital preservation

Digital preservation is the ability to retrieve, access, and use digital objects through time, while ensuring the authenticity and integrity properties of these objects. Data grids represent a model of storage systems designed for data management and sharing, which concept also has been proposed for digital preservation. However, since data grids are not specifically designed for this purpose, they present weaknesses that have to be handled. This poster will present a set of services to address a problem in the metadata catalogue of the iRODS data grid, strengthening that platform for digital preservation purposes.

Data Management with Risk Management in Engineering and Science Projects

Engineering and Science projects are facing new data management challenges, which are currently being addressed through the development of data management plans. However, project stakeholders are unable to proper assess if their plan is representative of good data management practices. To address this issue, we propose a risk management framework to assist the definition of a data management plan in engineering and science projects. To validate our proposal, we present an application to a civil engineering project concerning dam safety.

Managing risk data: From spreadsheets to information systems

The goal of Risk Management is to define prevention and control mechanisms to address the risks attached to specific activities and valuable assets. Many Risk Management efforts operate in silos with narrowly focused, functionally driven, and disjointed activities. That fact leads to a fragmented view of risks, where each activity uses its own language, customs and metrics. That limits an organization-wide perception of risks, where interdependent risks are not anticipated, controlled or managed. The lack of integrated solutions to manage risk information, lead the experts to use spreadsheets as their main tool, impeding collaboration, communication and reuse of risk information. In order to address these issues, this paper presents a solution that integrates a Risk Management framework, including a XML-based Domain Specific Language for Risk Management. The proposed framework is supported by an information system to manage the definition or risks.