Week 6

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

Information architecture is an overall plan of how an organisation is going to configure its IT resources to meet business goals where as information infrastructure is the actual implementation that provides an effective Information System, including services, hardware, software and people involved.

2. Describe how an organisation can implement a solid information architecture

With new architectures, organizations that use IT effectivilty can build new business capabilities faster, cheaper, and in a vocabulary the business can understand such as web services, which have become a major avenue for this integration, and  open systems and source code rather than proprietary systems and source code.

An organization may also use a solid information architecture to create an exact copy of a system’s information, known as backup while also implementing the ability to get a system up and running (including the data) in the event of a system crash or failure. A company may build a computer system designed that in the event a component fails, a backup component can immediately take over with no loss of service. Furthermore a backup operation in which the functions of a computer component such as a processor or a database is assumed by secondary system components when the primary component becomes unavailable through either failure or scheduled down time

3.       List and describe the five requirement characteristics of infrastructure architecture. 

àFlexibility = Able to meet changing business demands while involving multinational challenges
àScalability = Systems ability to meet growth requirements and involves Capacity planning
àReliability = High Accuracy and Low Accuracy puts the organisation at risk
àAvailability = High availability 99.999% uptime and ensures business continuity
àPerformance = How quickly a system performs a certain task an growing pressure on systems to be faster

4.       Describe the business value in deploying a service oriented architecture 

The service orientated architecture is using existing system in different ways to meet different demands. A company may build services then re uses same piece of technology as they are able to adapt quickly and easily to different demands. You can start to gain better information flows between different systems. Users can re-use applications many times for different tasks making expansion economical and more compatible.

5.       What is an event? 

Events are the eyes and ears of the business expressed in technology—they detect threats and opportunities and alert those who can act on the information. Pioneered by telecommunication and financial services companies, this involves using IT systems to monitor a business process for events that matter and automatically alert the people best equipped to handle the issue.

6.       What is a service?

Services are more like software products than they are coding projects. They must appeal to a broad audience, and they need to be reusable if they are going to have an impact on productivity. Early forms of services were defined at too low a level in the architecture to interest the business, such as simple “print” and “save” services. The new services are being defined at a higher level; they describe such things as “credit check,” “customer information,” and “process payment.” These services describe a valuable business process. For example, “credit check” has value not just for programmers who want to use that code in another application, but also for businesspeople who want to use it across multiple products—say, auto loans and mortgages—or across multiple business.

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

Virtual Computing Benefits is one of two emerging technologies that companies can use to increase performance and utilise their infrastructure effectively. This can be done by reducing capital costs through increases in energy efficiency while requiring less hardware which increasing your server to admin ratio. This ensures that the enterprise application performs with the highest availability and performance.  Virtualisation also improves enterprise desktop management & control with faster deployment of desktops and fewer support calls due to application conflict. It also reduces hardware infrastructure and increasing utilisation of software while consolidating and reducing power and cooling requirements.

The second of the two emerging technologies is Grid computing which is an aggregation of geographically dispersed computing, storage, and network resources, coordinated to deliver improved performance, higher quality of service, better utilization, and easier access to data.

Furthermore Grid computing is used by scientific, e-Commerce, technical or engineering projects that require many processing cycles to complete a job. It allows people to offer their free-processing time on home computers to companies