In many companies and in US government agencies, enterprise architecture (EA) governance is already considered as a consensus-driven framework to guide and direct significant architecture decisions related to IT assets and resources that may make significant architectural impacts to the business operations. However, business and IT professionals must get actively involved in using EA governance from its inception. Furthermore, the influence of EA governance must truly span the technology and business domains, at both the strategic and the tactical level.

My previous Executive Update "SAML: 'Beyond the Intranet' SSO Solution" discussed issues with implementing SAML 1.1. This Update identifies the shortcomings of SAML 1.1 and improvements that exist in the SAML 2 specification. SAML is Internet2's Shibboleth; SAML 2 enhancement requests are in many ways the result of feedback from experience with numerous deployments in the industry of SAML 1.1.

This is the fourth in a series of Executive Updates in which I analyze the results of a recent Cutter Consortium survey on the subject of open source Java frameworks (OSJFs). Here in Part IV, I discuss the survey's findings for GUI, the Web, Web services, and persistence. The remaining three topics -- middleware, development/testing, and comprehensive -- will be covered in the next Update, the last part of this series, in which I shall also take a quick look at some non-Java frameworks for the sake of comparison.

In this hour-long webinar, Cutter Senior Consultant Mitchell Ummel, answers your questions about what semantically-aware applications might mean for your enterprise. A follow-on to his wildly popular Cutter IT Journal issue of the same title, this webinar will help you better understand the implications of applying semantic web technologies to business problem domains where traditional enterprise systems have fallen short, such as BI, data mining, and CRM.