The disruption from the iPhone and iPad continues years after Steve Jobs started the revolution in smartphone technology. Due to demand by customers, enterprises serving consumers must consider how to provide that audience mobile applications that interface with their otherwise internal enterprise systems. Some examples of this from the financial services industry include Credit Suisse’s Onyx Touch, Merrill Edge for iPad and Bank of America’s Research Library.

It’s important for the enterprise architect to understand how each outward-facing application affects the infrastructure, so that he or she can plan for the big picture dealing with design, reuse, automation, integration, security and more. To get a thorough understanding of the issues involved, I recently spoke with a developer who has built multiple consumer-facing iOS applications with enterprise access for a Wall Street financial services firm. I was surprised at what I learned that affects my own work — and you may have the same reaction.   

The first thing I learned is that perhaps we architects are too concerned about the scalability demands created by a more mobile consumer audience. The developer with whom I spoke  explained to me that if you have architected your back-end systems to scale to support consumers accessing Web apps from their PCs, those systems are ready to perform for mobile visitors, too.

It’s in the area of security that what you’ve done for your consumer-facing Web apps differs from what you’ll need to do for your consumer-facing mobile apps. (But you probably guessed that, didn’t you?)  

Insecure About Security

Let’s break the issue of security down a bit further, to examine the not-so-obvious consumer/enterprise issues, such as:  

• local storage
• encrypted communication
• session management
• remote data wipe

“The biggest concern with our mobile apps [deals with] locally stored data,” said my source. If a consumer is using a mobile app to access data that is owned by the enterprise or another entity, such as one of its partners, it’s too risky for certain businesses to provide an option [that lets] the user locally store that information or any operations he conducts with it. It opens the door to problems for the business if the consumer’s device is lost or stolen.  

“You need to view it as though you’re lending the data to look at. You need to stop common operations such as copy/paste,” according to the developer. A seemingly valid consumer user may in fact be a rogue employee trying to steal data. Or, since it is a consumer app, you may not be able to even identify the users at all.

Obviously, there are some industries and/or mobile apps where local storage isn’t necessarily a problem. There’s not much at stake, for instance, if a user can store the ranking stats for an entertainment company’s mobile multiplayer game on his iPad. Where corporate data security is a concern, could strong local encryption make a difference? Yes, and it’s an area where the enterprise architect also must help set standards. “The data accessed by mobile apps needs to have stringent security requirements, based on those from the enterprise data group,” my source said. Strong encryption is necessary when communicating over cellular or Wi-Fi networks, for starters, and even temporary files need to be encrypted to guard against accidental exposure in case the application crashes.

For consumer applications that give users optional access to privileged systems and/or data for a fee, strong session management should be on the enterprise architect’s standards list, as well. “Where I work, we need to support at least three types of time-outs,” said my source, for free and stepped-up levels of access. They are:

1. Inactivity based time-outs.

2. Time-outs that occur when the time between Web service calls is too long.

3. A maximum time limit for an open session, regardless of activity. This ensures that if an unauthorized party breaks into the system, the amount of time on the system is limited.

Should an issue arise about compromised enterprise data, the architect must ensure that there’s a way to deal with information existing in a local state on a consumer’s device at the time the security issue is detected. You have to make sure there is a facility for remotely wiping the data resident in local memory, along with the entire application, on the mobile device, while leaving all else on the device intact.

Another difference for enterprise architects to consider, which lies outside the security realm, is providing as much functionality as possible offline. “You should minimize features that work only when the device is connected [to the Internet],” the developer told me. The result is that users can get to features right away, without having to wait for a mobile device to boot and a network connection to be established. That’s one reason, he says, that his firm’s iPad app was preferred to competitors. (You also should read our recent feature, How to Architect a Successful Mobile Strategy for additional information on security and other requirements for mobile apps.)

In many ways, the instant-on, instant gratification offered by mobile applications at our fingertips (like the one you can read about here) lends itself perfectly to a world that demands access to critical data as quickly as possible. The real question is: What took us so long to realize this? Let us know how you’re driving a successful consumer-focused mobile strategy at your enterprise.

We’ve pondered before on this site the situation in which enterprise architects find themselves — that is, that most people in the organization don’t quite understand their work or the impact it has on business success. If you want to help change that perception, maybe it’s time to start making some more noise about your own work on the world stage.

Outside the defense industry and the Defense Enterprise Architecture Awards, which are given jointly by The Association for Enterprise Information (AFEI) and the Office of the Department of Defense Chief Information Officer, Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Standards Directorate, there may not be a slew of opportunities to do this. But one of them is coming up this month: Enterprise and IT services firm iCMG for the last couple of years has had a global competition to recognize the work of enterprise architects in a wide range of areas, from enterprise transformation and planning to customer-oriented business models to technical expertise in IT service management. And this time around, it’s got some new categories that could throw an even brighter spotlight on just how crucial enterprise architects’ work is to the business.  

One of them is an award for Most Innovative Enterprise/Business/Technical architecture. How can you not love an award with the word “innovative” in the title, especially from the EA point-of-view? I’d bet there are bound to be lots of entries on the technical innovations, whether it’s improving service-oriented architecture performance through new architectural patterns or architecting mission-critical apps in Hadoop.

All good stuff, but I’m equally looking forward to what we may learn from contestants about their work exploiting EA as the foundation of all sustainable innovation in the enterprise. With an architecture setting forth standards, frameworks and maturity models to guide development, envelope-pushing innovations should be less likely to occur in isolation, or at higher costs because of potential duplication of existing efforts, or without regard for how they may be repurposed beyond one business unit to service the enterprise at large, and so without the peril of becoming just another legacy implementation that can’t seamlessly evolve with the business. (Check out Eric Bruno’s series of growing agility through federation here and here, as well as his piece on architects vs. enthusiasts here, for some insight into realizing this picture.) 

Perhaps we’ll even see some real-world evidence of what Forrester’s Brian Hopkins has blogged about in the provocatively titled, “Do Not Depend on EA to Innovate.” While the title doesn’t sound particularly positive, he actually posits a role for enterprise architects “at the center of an Innovation Network where they connect innovation suppliers (lead users who are dreaming up new ways to solve their problems) with innovation users (other folks who can benefit from a generalization of the solutions the suppliers come up with). In addition, [enterprise architects] can bring innovation implementers — the team members who know how to actually make innovations into solutions that work for more than just one individual or group — into the conversation.”

What also caught my eye about this year’s awards is the introduction of a business domains, or industry, focus. Telco and media/entertainment, manufacturing, government and public sector, health care, retail — they’re all here. I think this just validates a point we’ve made on the site previously: Some enterprise architects may debate the value of focusing too intently on vertical industry expertise, but we think specialization is going to be of increasing value. If the enterprise architect isn’t strongly aligned to the industry in which the entity operates, the challenge of focusing EA processes to deliver real business value — of being the link between IT and the business — becomes that much harder.

I think you’ll see evidence of that vertical expertise even among past entrants. For example, an in-house development architected at ICICI Bank Limited to leverage technology and analytics in debt management surely required the enterprise architects to incorporate a good understanding of real-world collection strategies. Or think of the multiparty process intersections that must have been considered by the enterprise architects at The Hartford who streamlined the independent agent and underwriter sales-and-distribution experience for small business owner insurance sales. 

I’d also like to hear other architects in our crowd crow about their success stories with the Zachman Framework. This isn’t a new award at iCMG, but rather an annual one that should garner added interest this year, given the revision to that framework, which we discussed with John Zachman here.

Will you take the opportunity to get the word out about why your enterprise architecture matters, through this contest or other means? If so, let us know  what tack you’re taking. And good luck!

Professional Development Series

Last fall the Association of Enterprise Architects (AEA) — originally founded by the Open Group back in 2007, but now a separate not-for-profit organization — announced that its membership exceeded 20,000. Enterprise architects from 72 countries count themselves among its members. Upon reaching this milestone, Association CEO Steve Nunn had this to say:

“Industry demand for developing Enterprise Architecture as a profession has been the impetus behind the surge in membership and displays the commitment that practitioners, as well as their employers, are making when building their Enterprise Architecture strategy.”

But just as membership in the AEA reflects the growing demand by enterprises to embrace the discipline of architecture and profit from the standardization and integration it brings to the business, it also reflects an understanding by architects that it’s to their own benefit to join. Professional associations and organizations provide a forum to engage in discussions (online or live) about critical issues with like-minded individuals and contribute to industry efforts. They can be a pathway to educational and career opportunities; members may hear about possible jobs through their association networks long before they’re posted on Monster.com. And these associations promote and advocate for the profession in which you are invested. 

With all of this in mind, Smart Architect is kicking off what will be a regular series of blogs on professional development with a look at some of the associations you may want to investigate to further your profession’s interests as well as your own. Here are few to get you started:

Name: Association of Enterprise Architects

Membership: The primary professional membership level is its Member grade, which is open to a TOGAF® or Open CA certified Enterprise Architect. Fellow-grade membership is open to applicants who have five years’ AEA membership under their belts, and who hold a senior enterprise architect position. Other membership options also are available for those working toward TOGAF or Open CA certification and students.

Mission: AEA’s goals are to increase job opportunities for members and increase their market value by advancing professional excellence, and to raise the status of the profession as a whole. Only Member- and Fellow-grade members may join task- or issue-oriented work groups aimed at helping to advance the profession.

Name: Center for the Advancement of the Enterprise Architecture Profession (CAEAP)

Membership: Interested individuals must read and sign the Enterprise Architect's Professional Oath, which CAEAP describes as a social contract for moral behavior, commitment toward the community, and mutual obligation among members and the enterprise architecture profession itself. The oath is a guideline for shaping the behavior of EA professionals and for stating the consequences of misbehavior.

Mission: CAEAP says it promotes the professional status of enterprise architects, including clarifying the contributions of professional enterprise architects and creating brand recognition for the profession. It is also interested in advocacy about determining ethical behaviors and levels of regulatory self-governance, and educational and experiential standards for professional competency.    

Name: The International Association of Software Architects http://www.iasaglobal.org/iasa/default.asp (IASA)

Membership: Individuals can enroll as full, student or contributing members, at varying fee levels.

Mission: The International Association of Software Architects (IASA) makes its match with architects committed to the advancement and sharing of issues related to software architecture in the enterprise, product, education and government sectors. It wants to advance best practices and education while delivering programs and services to IT architects of all levels.  

Name: ISACA

Membership: Membership levels include professional and student at varying fee levels, and complimentary membership for academics in certain functional disciplines.

Mission: While not exclusively directed to enterprise architects, the independent, nonprofit, global association has a focus on practical guidance, benchmarks and other tools for the IT-enabled enterprise in areas that intersect with EA interests, including governance and security. Some of its brands include the Risk IT governance framework and the Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control (CRISC) certification for helping the enterprise understand business risk.

Name: Association of Business Process Management Professionals International (ABPMP)

Membership: Professional, academic and student memberships are available at different fee levels. Corporations also may join. Only professional and corporate members have voting privileges.

Mission: A practitioner-oriented and practitioner-led nonprofit, ABPMP hopes to guide the development of business process management as a mainstream discipline and serve as the authority for certifying BPM practitioners. While it, like ISACA, is not specifically geared to enterprise architects, it does count them among its members, including its Metro New York Chapter president. It makes sense, given the value that can come from combining EA and BPM in the service of architecturally enabled enterprise change that draws on improved, aligned and even automated processes.

This is just a starter list, and one focused on memberships that individuals themselves can join. If your organization wants to be part of an association whose interests align with enterprise architecture, corporate membership is available to organizations such as The Open Group, whose standards and certification programs for enterprise architects have been adopted worldwide, and Penn State’s Center for Enterprise Architecture, where partnering organizations can have early access to research and reports, exposure to undergraduate students interested in the discipline and the chance to sponsor their EA capstone projects, and the ability to influence the future of enterprise architecture education at multiple levels (undergraduate, graduate and professional education).

We’re sure there are many other professional groups that you’ve found invaluable in your own career, and we invite you to share your thoughts on what those are and how they’ve contributed to your own success. We also welcome your comments on any of the associations mentioned in this blog – what has been your experience as a member? Let us know below.

Storage is critical enterprise infrastructure, and how best to protect these environments to ensure the safety and recovery of the data that resides there is pretty darn important. But is this sometimes a bit overlooked by enterprise architects thinking more about big-picture strategies than nitty-gritty details?

Perhaps. Consider, for example, that physical to virtual infrastructure transitions present the best chance nearly any organization will have for some time to rearchitect its backup methodology, says Marco Coulter, Research Director for Storage Practice at TheInfoPro (a division of 451 Research). After all, a large-scale change like that doesn’t happen every day. You have to “exploit that opportunity, because you may not get it again for another 10 years,” he says.

Yet, when laying out the frameworks for physical to virtual infrastructure projects, most enterprise architects won’t have a ready answer about accomplishing backup redesign, he says. That has to change: Just as enterprise architects have a role in helping simplify server environments, so too should they play a part in reducing management overhead — i.e., the cost factor — for data protection. “This is a way of protecting the business; it’s not the business,” Coulter notes. “The time you spend doing this isn’t creating business value.” Yet, according to Storage Study Wave 15 done in 1H2011 by TheInfoPro, backup remains the largest storage time-sink (see chart below).

Complexity has had a long reign when it comes to storing, managing and protecting data, going back to the days of purely physical environments. Without guidance from enterprise architects, the addition of virtualization, on- and off-premises clouds, and SaaS solutions, can further complicate data management and protection — certainly during the period of time when organizations are transitioning to these new technologies and environments.    

David Liff, VP, Global Marketing, at CA Technologies, sees the enterprise architect as bringing the risk assessor’s eye to the job, to apply recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) principles appropriate to each specific business process, across whatever swaths of technology are in place or moving into place, and ideally enabling all protections via a single ergonomic console. “Architecting storage used to be about making sure you had enough storage and that it was working. That’s now a given,” he says. “Now it’s about driving risk management around storage architectures, based on the business process defining RPO and RTO.”

The amount of data the enterprise is willing to lose and the amount of time it is willing to wait to recover information depends on the impact that each specific loss-and-recovery effort will have on the business. It may be okay to lose a day’s worth of human resource transactions and to wait two weeks to recover HR data, but clearly it’s a very different story for the transactions and data involved with online trading system processes, for example. There, the requirement may be to restore back to just one minute or one transaction ago, and to do it instantly. While storage architects are themselves being asked to think more about protection according to RPO and RTO objectives, they should be defining those SLA goals in consultation with enterprise architects, Liff says.

Indeed, the enterprise architect should make it a point to be involved now more than ever. After all, enterprise architects regularly deal with governance issues, and increased regulatory and legal requirements — such as producing digital records in a timely manner as part of electronic discovery of evidence during litigation — demand good storage architecting and data protection practices. 

The enterprise architect also is needed now, more than ever, to help guide backup and recovery strategies because the enterprise has to move away from using many technology solutions to manage and protect distinct environments — physical, virtual, cloud — to a solution that can range across these platforms and across their various vendors, while seamlessly accommodating different business process Service Level Agreements. “That’s a challenge that creates churn,” Liff says. “Storage is known for high levels of complexity, and in large organizations you have teams of experts running different solutions, but their expertise is not portable. These teams are passionate about what they do and emotionally attached to what they know, too. Once you get to the business-driven goals of RTO and RPO, you need someone who’s outside of just the storage world — the enterprise architect — to decide what is the way forward to a more comprehensive solution that gives you granular control at a very high level.” (Today there are just a very few solutions that fit the bill, including CA Technologies’ ARCserve, he says.)

However you’re contemplating addressing storage in the new year, Coulter makes an important comment about getting these architectures right, especially in light of all the work most enterprises have been doing around server virtualization and the growth in capacity that that’s been driving. “Get it wrong and you will spend more and more on storage, and that eats into the savings [virtualization can deliver] on the server side,” he says.

How are you planning to help your enterprise get storage right? 

I’m sure you’ve heard comments like these before: “How do I prove my value to the organization’s leaders? Why don’t they understand what enterprise architecture really enables for the business?”  Well, opportunity’s knocking to change all that.

You will recognize it by the Big Data overcoat it’s wearing.

You know that oft-quoted statistic that humans use no more than 10 percent of their brain power? It turns out that the enterprise effectively uses less than 5 percent of its data power. That means there’s a whole lot of data there that’s not being maximized to drive business revenue or cost-savings. The enterprise architect who can help align the infrastructure and processes so that the organization can do more and get more out of its data — delivering real, tangible results that senior leaders can “touch and feel,” so to speak — is the enterprise architect who will get the recognition he or she so richly deserves.

Clearly, you and your colleagues, businesses, agencies and the IT industry at large are thinking about this (have a look at the article Big Data Proliferation Requires Big Solutions here). In my last blog, for example, I talked about some of the skills prospective employers expect enterprise architects to bring to the job-market table, and increasingly one of them is expertise in dealing with Big Data. Consider also the attention being paid to the relationship between Big Data and enterprise architecture at big industry conferences. The Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2011 touted sessions for enterprise architects such as Big Data for IT/OT: Integrating Real-Time Data Into Decisions, for instance. And the Hadoop World 2011 conference also featured its own enterprise architecture track, whose topics include how the open source Apache Hadoop project is being used to build real-time big-data services at Facebook, and how companies can bridge the gap between data warehouses and Hadoop to extract business intelligence from large, heterogeneous data sets. 

Research firm Forrester — the minds behind that 5 percent estimated data use figure — also has been all over the role enterprise architects can play in helping the organization boost its data returns, including taking thought leadership roles on the importance of a holistically approached information architecture and the need to assess applications’ integration of knowledge through service-oriented architecture (SOA), business intelligence (BI) and other mechanisms. But the usual approaches and implementations of these capabilities may well require revisiting. In his blog, Forrester Principal Analyst Brian Hopkins has noted that Big Data “will require new processes and may totally redefine your approach to data governance.”

The why for making changes such as those Hopkins describes is tied to the fact that now we’re not just talking about making sense of a lot of data. That’s been happening around historical data and predictive analytics for a long time. The why lies in the multiple aspects of Big Data that Forrester and other analyst firms are talking about. Call it the four V’s of volume, velocity, variability and variety, as Forrester has. Or, apply its attributes in any acronym you prefer, such as SVA-US (scale, volume and acceleration — structured and unstructured, including rich media and social media data), maybe, or VCS (volume, complexity of data types, and speed). The end result is the same. Traditional data warehouse and business intelligence systems can’t affordably keep up with making sense of the deluge, in real time, across diverse formats and in unpredictable ways. Nor do those tried-and-true approaches necessarily lend themselves to the increased interaction with data by more business users.

Here are just a few of the projects I’ve heard about that help illustrate both the complexity of getting value from so much data that so relentlessly enters the enterprise in so many forms, and the concrete value of moving in this direction:

• A major bank has a project under way to use everything from transaction data to audio files from service calls with customers to improve its ability to get a true picture of what happens in fraudulent cases and to better detect fraudulent occurrences. 

• One large health insurance firm has to deal with data from internal and external sources sprawling across in-patient, out-patient, pharmacy, finance and cost-management groups, for analysis of everything from treatments to demographics to lab tests, in order to provide decision support that lets doctors and nurses choose the best course of care. 

• Tracking social media — talk about a wild, wooly and unstructured Big Data space! — made it possible for one firm to identify influencers in its area and then to send marketing messages outlining its solution’s benefits to those whose messages it deemed might have an impact on their followers.

What’s needed to conquer such oncoming challenges and realize emerging successes is someone to champion a new way forward, to architect a vision around Big Data. That vision, I’d think, needs to be an expansive one, inclusive of things like direct interaction with data assets by the business and dynamic information discovery. That champion should be YOU.

How’s Big Data knocking at your enterprise’s door, and what’s your strategy for answering the call? Share your stories with your peers here.

Imagine having to manage your personal computer the way you manage the distributed servers in your data center…

• Instead of simply purchasing and installing apps that perform the useful functions you want, you have to laboriously piece each one together component by component and integrate and secure them yourself, or engage professional services consultants to do it for you over weeks (or more) while you struggle to still use your computer for other useful work.
• Instead of just launching each app you want to use, you have to first specify how much CPU, memory, disk space, and network capacity you are going to allocate to it — and not just maximums, but how much will be consumed all the time (and if your demand spikes to more than those fixed amounts, all kinds of trouble from service degradation to crashes will ensue).
• Instead of blithely launching additional apps as you need them, you have to manually rebalance the allocation of capacity to all your other apps to make room for each additional one.  After all, capacity can only sum up to 100%.
• Instead of only running each app you want to use for the period of time you need to use it, it is so hard and takes so long to allocate and de-allocate resources and to start and stop apps that you have to keep them all on all the time.
• Instead of your operating system dynamically tracking your attention and use of the multiple apps you have running at any one time, bestowing the most capacity upon the one you care about most or that is working hardest to provide its services, all your apps are always consuming whatever invariant portion of the resources you gave them when you launched them, needed or not, and even though you have only one "in front" on your desktop and are working intensely with it, it can only limp along using the fraction you gave it when you launched it.

These are just a few of the ugly and awkward differences between the experience we enjoy on our personal computers (and, yes, our individual servers and mainframes), where the operating system and user interface dynamically manage the prioritization and allocation of infrastructure resources to what we care about most — our applications — almost completely without requiring us to think about capacity or demand, and the harsh typical enterprise IT management reality.  When I think about how I use my computer, I am sure that my IT-enabled productive use of it would be severely hobbled -- at least a 10x hit -- if I had to be as aware and engaged in the constant minutia of managing and allocating every type and level of my computing infrastructure and the assembly and deployment of every application.  We're probably talking about at least 10x more cost for 1/10th the utility, and let's not even try to estimate the difference in agility. 

In my personal IT world, all I really care about are my applications and the services they provide.  The software that manages the starting and the stopping of those apps, the dialing up and down of resource allocation, and the sharing, separation, and prioritization of access to fixed real hardware capacity does so seamlessly, invisibly, and in a manner so responsive to my shifts in attention and demand that most of the time I am not even aware of its operation.

Imagine what it would take to approach that level of intelligent and dynamic automation of our distributed enterprise infrastructure management, of having the luxury of application-oriented management that responded to and optimized for business service needs instead of requiring the hammering of applications to fit the static and manually-administered infrastructure mold.  That's what we've been thinking about at CA Technologies, and we're planning to share some of that thinking with you during the "Cloud Agility Architecture" segment of the Smart Architect session at CA World.  Hint:  It's more than virtualization, more than what we think of as automation today, more even than "cloud", though all three of these are important prior art. 

Bring your use cases and be ready to contribute your feedback.  This is our imagination at work, but we're serious about making it a reality.

A couple of months back I was taking a class on sketching at the Art Institute Museum. I was trying to learn how the UPS guy on the commercials can draw on a whiteboard and talk at the same time.  Needless to say this was not on the topic list.  Instead there was the topic of negative space.

What is negative space you might ask?

We will get back to that in a second...

Anyhow we got our stools to sit on, were handed charcoal and some paper, and sat at the top of the steps in the front lobby of the museum.  On the walls were these grillwork patterns that one will see on a building.  Complicated criss-crossing lines that made sense when viewed 20 feet away, but look too complex to even contemplate when viewed 1-2 feet away. The instructors asked us to draw them. There was the collective gasp as we realized that none of us, even the ones that had previous art training, had any chance of drawing them.

Then came this idea of negative space. The instructors asked us to draw the spaces between the grillwork. They wanted us to forget about the grillwork completely and draw what was behind it. Sounds strange, doesn't it? As I did this on the first grill I started drawing shapes.  When I looked at these shapes up close they all looked unrelated. As I drew more and more my sheet started to look like a bunch of weird shapes all strewn out on the paper.  This certainly appeared to be some strange exercise in futility. The instructors asked us to pull the paper a few feet away and "Voila," all of the shapes disappeared and what remained was the grillwork. It appeared the minute that I looked at the paper as a whole.

So what does this have to do with enterprise architecture?

Technology is a big part of enterprise architecture. Our tendency is to see everything within the confines of a technical implementation. "Which technologies make sense?" "Which ones do not?" "Is this a place for cloud computing?" "How does this fit in with SOA?"  If an we have a technology stack in place the questions are immediate. How does anything we want to do fit in with what is already there? 

Another way to ask these questions is to forget about the technology and infrastructure entirely. Start asking what would the situation be like if there was no technology at all. What would this mean to do this without technology? Do the design at the same level of abstraction as you would with the technology. Even forget that the users have computer screens, mobile phones and other devices.

This is negative space thinking. 

Ever wonder how files, trashcans, folders, and many or the other monikers ended up on personal computers?  These were not just pictures that were familiar to the user, they operate in the same way as their real-life counterparts.  We empty a trashcan,  we organize our files into filesystems, which were originally file cabinets.  How did this help in design?  It wasn't too hard to imagine putting all of the files that we have in file cabinets into the computer.  There was this instant connection. 

So how does this happen? How is this accomplished?

The iterative model gives us a great start.  Focus on these smaller stories instead of the big picture. As these stories are defined use common artifices, like the trashcans and folders used before, that are proxies to technology. Instead of databases think of lists, schedules, and papers. As these are brought together into the bigger story these pieces should start to converge. Looked at closely, these are just pieces of data, looked from afar and technology will start to emerge. 

What if you have the overall story already?

That is OK and a good thing.  This provides the scope and context for our stories. The trick is to avoid decomposing the larger stories into the smaller ones. One might see the overall grill and should. Instead of splitting the grill up into sections start finding and drawing the white spaces. Eventually, the internal grillwork will emerge. The same thing will happen in our case as well!