Whether you are an experienced IT architect seeking guidance or a member of the development team hoping to advance your skills into the architecture arena, chances are you have basic IT issues you are trying to solve by consulting developerWorks.
Consider this a starting point for getting answers to your most pressing architectural questions. The developerWorks team consulted with IT architects who work for IBM during customer engagements. We asked them to identify the issues they face most often, and the issues faced most often by IT architects within IBM customer development teams. The issues you see here -- organized into four main topical areas -- are the ones they identified as most common among the IT architect community.
Here we provide guidance to specific articles, tutorials, examples, downloads, discussion forums, blogs, and other material that can provide answers to these common architecture-related questions. This is designed as a shortcut to the most useful material for IT architects from developerWorks and elsewhere within IBM. We hope these materials will provide at least a high-level solution to the architecture issues you face. From them, you can dig deeper into the developerWorks Architecture area and the entire library.
We understand that not everyone will have the same issues, and that some of you will have questions not covered here. The best way to submit pressing questions you do not see here is by visiting our IT Architecture discussion forum. By doing that, chances are a member of the IBM architecture community will answer your question, and your question will become a candidate for inclusion on this page. You can also send ideas you have to Paul Dreyfus, one of the editors of this page. You can reach him at pdreyfus@us.ibm.com.
Check back here regularly: We will update the top architectural issues covered here -- and our guidance to the solutions -- based on your feedback.
Basic questions you likely face every day in trying to get your job done -- tools of the trade, lessons learned from other IT architects, training for IT architects, and approaches you can bring to your work to make you successful.
How do I understand my organization's business needs and align my IT architecture to support them? Apply the business needs of my organization to my system's architecture?
The fundamentals of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), why IBM supports this architectural style, when it is right for you, and how you can start migrating your IT infrastructure and applications to leverage the benefits of SOA.
Why should I care about SOA, and when is it the right choice and the wrong choice?
Discussion forum "Best practices for SOA and Web services" (Community)
What is Business-Driven Development?
SOA design and development Pointers to wealth of material about SOA in general, SOA development tools and best practices, and adoption guidance (Collection)
The basic job of the architect -- to design IT systems that meet the needs of the business, including managing and monitoring those systems and improving them based on quantitative and qualitative measures.
What patterns, reference architectures, industry-specific solutions, and other reusable assets does IBM offer and support, and how do I use them?
The task you probably face the most often in today's multiplatform, multitechnology, multivendor world, where we invest in the new and preserve our investment in the old -- tying together computing systems that were not initially designed to work together.
How do I define business processes, and how do I integrate those processes within my own company and between my company and those of our partners, suppliers, and other members of our business environment?
How do I set up an environment where people in my company can communicate and collaborate among themselves, with people in our partner and supplier companies, and with our customers?
How do I integrate and connect applications within my own company and among the companies of our partners and suppliers, even when those applications are running on different platforms?
