XSLTC To The Rescue

1. Enterprise Architecture Implementation:Practical Steps Using Open Source Tools Marina Arseniev Enterprise Architect, Assistant Director Administrative Computing Services, UC Irvine [email_address]

Challenges

Enterprise Architecture - An Overview

The desired result

Practical Steps how we got to where we are today

Enterprise Architecture Framework: Zachman Framework

Modeling, Knowledge Base and Ontology Tool:Protg

And more

Results

Year Founded: 1965

2004 Enrollment: 24K students

Carnegie Classification: Doctoral/Research Extensive

Extramural Contracts & Grants Awarded: $235M for 2002 2003

Significant enrollment growth expected

California State budget

Administrative systems must adapt

If the bowling pins are the IT solutions you provide for your customers, what is the ball?

Hint:Objective is to knock down maximum pins with one ball...

Your IT organization a bowling alley?

Hundreds of systems - IBM Mainframe, Solaris, Windows

CICS/Cobol, Powerbuilder, Web/Java Applications, Vendor packages

VSAM, DB2, Oracle and Sybase

Lack of Real-time

Integration based on FTP =Time lags

Data inconsistency and quality issues = High technical and business labor costs for repair or reconciliation

Users use disparate systems, user interfaces = Training

New compliance regulations

Security threats

Sophisticated business community that understands potential of technology to make serious business improvements.

Growing queue of projects.

Increasing complexity and technology choices for solutions.

Workflow, Imaging...

Complex project management became critical to mission

Project justification, selection, prioritization, sequencing

Extraction of common requirements for horizontal, reusable solutions

Enterprise Architecture (EA) Initiative identified

IT department of 25 programmers

Mainframe programmers, Powerbuilder developers, Java/Web technologists, Database and System administrators.

Resources, competency, training, governance

Sound familiar?

Improve Planning

Help make more informed IT decisions

Reduce Complexity

Lifecycle management - To establish a process that is focused on building, maintaining, acquiring, and retiring technology

Improve IT to Business alignment

Facilitate the adaptation of technology to changing business needs and pressures in campus administration

Which technology solutions solve which business needs, and how?

A blueprint of an organization to analyze and plan changes.

The structure of (Enterprise) components, relationships, and principles and guidelines governing their evolution over time.

A strategic asset repository which defines the current and target architecture environments.

New application?

What do we have already in place?

Impact?

Desired result

Perfect world...

goals articulated

roadmap, projects linked

technology linked

change strategy

Irvines model

Based on Zachman Framework

A standard methodology or framework

A model

A repository of knowledge (populated model)

A change management process

Business needs define application and required infrastructure change

Project-oriented approach to EA

Projects = Change

If the bowling pins are the IT solutions you provide for your customers, what is the ball?

The ball is the project(s) that you pick strategically and organize into a roadmap for change!

Objective is to knock down maximum pins with one ball...

Before you can do that, you must understand your EA - business processes, information/data, and technology.

1: Create a list of specific questions, focusing on critical areas.

2: Identify senior technical and business people to gather knowledge from; their roles and responsibilities in the EA process.

3: Develop change impact analysis methodology

4: Choose an Enterprise Architecture Framework

5: Choose a tool to model and populate Enterprise Architecture Asset Repository

Goal: easily accessible and maintainable repository

6: Plan communication methods

7: Document Technical Reference Architecture

Principles, standards, and governance

8:Enforce architectural control

Choose key technologies and standardize. Constrain new development.

Step 9:Incremental EA model development and population

Create and populate model as defined by questions

Define As-is:

Business model and processes.

Applications, data, components.

How IT systems support the business processes.

Project life cycle, SDLC

Identify desired enhancements to business as projects.For complex enhancements, organize projects into roadmaps .

Communicate, assess and track impact of change up, down, and across.

Our critical problems:

Life cycle management , governance

Link business goals, projects, and justification

Control proliferation and retirement of technology

Extraction of Common Vision Requirements across projects into patterns for reusable, horizontal components.

Application and datasecurityfor HIPAA and California State Bill 1386 compliance.

How should we prioritize our projects and assign resources?

How do we implement common requirements across projects into reusable, tested components?

How much reuse do we have today?

What technology should I use today for a web app and database?When will it be retired from our organization?

What data is subject to Federal or State Regulations?

Which applications use this data and how secure are they?

What technologies does this project use?What projects does this technology support?

Identified key IT people who also know the business.

People from business units (e.g: HumanResources)

Agreed on roles and responsibilities.

Need a change How do you know which one, when, and how?

Analyze and articulate impact of change to business or technology.

Measure impact of moving from a current to targeted practice.

Freely available Sloan School of Managements Matrix of Change tool. ( http:// ccs . mit . edu / MoC ).

Need direction and guidance?

Many frameworks to choose from. Comparison at:http://www.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf8-doc/arch/p4/others/others. htm

Adopted the Zachman Framework ( http://www. zifa .com )

What is it?

A language that helps people think about complex concepts and communicate in non-technical terminology.

Planning tool

Columns = questions (taken from Software Productivity Consortium)

Who :Represents the people relationships within the enterprise. The design of the enterprise organization has to do with the allocation of work and the structure of authority and responsibility. The vertical dimension represents delegation of authority, and the horizontal represents the assignment of responsibility.

When :Represents time, or the event relationships. This is useful for designing the master schedule, the processing architecture, control architecture, and timing devices.

Why :Describes the motivations of the enterprise. This reveals the enterprise goals and objectives, business plan, knowledge architecture and design.

What :Describes the entities involved in each perspective of the enterprise. Examples include business objects, relational tables, or field definitions.

How :Shows the functions within each perspective. Examples include business processes, software application function, computer hardware function, and language control loop.

Where :Shows locations and interconnections within the enterprise. This includes major business geographical locations, separate sections within a logistics network, allocation of system nodes, or even memory addresses within the system.

Rows = Unique perspectives (taken from Software Productivity Consortium)

Scope :Corresponds to an executive summary for a planner who wants an estimate of the size, cost, and functionality of the system.

Business model :Shows all the business entities and processes and how they interact.

System model :Used by a systems analyst who must determine the data elements and software functions that represent the business model.

Technology model :Considers the constraints of tools, technology, and materials.

Components :Represent individual, independent modules that can be allocated to contractors for implementation.

Working system :Depicts the operational system as it functions.

How do I model and collect information for the EA?

Zachman Framework -powerful thinking tool

lacks technology for putting it into practice.

Storing redundant lists of stuff in Word, Excel, Visio was difficult.

Application lists, security information, critical business cycles

Stanfords Protg Knowledgebase and Ontology Tool

Auto generates forms for collecting information based on ontology and class definitions.

Generates HTML output

Open source athttp :// protege . stanford . edu /

Protg minimizes redundancy, increases consistency

Meets Zachman Framework vision of storing an enterprise artifact in a single place.

Protg and Zachman Perspectives (Rows)

Plug-in produces XML output.

XML processed using XSLT into appropriate presentations, per Zachman Perspectives (audience).

Open source XML and XSLT available as Xerxes and Xalan fromhttp://www.apache.org

Example of how we use Protg to collect information for Zachman Framework.

Example of how we report from Protg using XML/XSLT.

Documented principles, guidelines, and best practices of Architecture Domains:

Lifecycle Management

Adopt the 4 year/16 Quarter Sliding Window Methodology

Identifies technologies that are Approved , Maintained but not Upgraded , in Sunset , Retired , or By Approval Only .

Standardized on

J2EE & Expresso - an Open Source Java Application Development Framework - Apache Struts and MVC. ( http://www. jcorporate .com )

LDAP Directory Services ( http://www. openldap .org )

Open Source JA-SIG uPortal software.A Java-based portal developed by Higher-Ed for Higher-Ed. ( http://www.ja-sig.org )

Single sign-on based on Web-ISO and Kerberos for campus-wide web applications.

Immediate benefits -reuse of components and metrics.Reduced skill sets and solution choices.

Examples of how we use Protg

Zachman Physical Perspective (Row 3) - Technology Life Cycle

Alignment of IT to Business: Link from Goal to Project to Technology, justifying investment and identifying gaps.

Tracking HIPAA and California State Bill 1386 Security Compliance

Use Protg to model and collect organizational information.

Track security compliance.

Track common requirements across projects.

Justify investment decisions and vendor selection.

Create links between our goals, roadmaps, projects, and technologies.

Determine touch points between projects and technologies to assess impact of change.

Technologies retired

Database servers consolidated

MS IIS Web Server (except where required by vendor) - 2003

Clipper - February, 2004

Reduced required IT skill sets

Oracle DBA due to limited resources, migrated off of Oracle

Java focus

Applications are database neutral (Expresso/JDBC)

Reduced development costs

Code reuse:Expresso objects, SSO Java lib shared between IBM, Solaris, Windows platforms, shared user objects.

Common infrastructure for development: LDAP, Workflow

More responsive to customers needs

Reduced data management costs

Reduce complex and costly interfaces between incongruent systems

Management decisions in all functional areas based on more accurate and timely data

New systems are developed faster and at less cost due to common data, common code, and a shortened requirements phase

Easier to evaluate and select vendor packages

Source: Enterprise Architecture Planning

by Steven Spewak

Projects done without architecture planning cost significantly more in the long term (John Zachman)

Desired resultthe perfect world

Reduce IT complexity (and cost)

Reduce queue and increase timeliness of projects

Facilitate a strategic road map for change with careful project selection and planning.

If the bowling pins are the IT solutions you provide for the customers, what is your ball?

The bowling ball is the project(s) that you pick strategically and organize into a roadmap for change!

Game objective: knock down maximum pins with one ball...

Who (or what) makes

the bowling ball (your IT projects)

roll at precisely the right spot in the lane and

at optimal speed?

Your Enterprise Architecture!

Before you can bowl with projects, you must understand your EA - business processes, information/data,and technology.

Using the tools shown today you can start bowling tomorrow!

UC Irvines EA Web Site:apps. adcom . uci . edu / EnterpriseArch

Zachman Framework:www. zifa .com/

Sloan School of Managements Matrix of Change:ccs . mit . edu / MoC

Ontology and Knowledgebase:protege . stanford . edu /

UC Irvines Administrative Portal:snap. uci . eduuses JA-SIG uPortal software:www. ja -sig.org/

Reporting using XML/XSLT:www.apache.org

Java Application Dev. Framework:www. jcorporate .com/

LDAP:www. openldap .org/

XSLTC To The Rescue

Business

business model

ea projects

ea business processes

ea process

business people

business alignment

ea planning

technology solutions