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INDUSTRY WATCH: One Blueprint for Architectures
By David Rubinstein
 July 1, 2004 — As the presidential legacies of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton are debated at memorials, in memoirs and from memories, one federal achievement is obscured by Iran-Contra, “Read my lips,” and “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” However, it might prove to have the longest life of them all.
It’s the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996, also known as the Information Technology Reformation Act. And recent efforts by vendors and a pair of consortia are intended to make it easier to comply with the law, which states the government will not fund any technology projects that are not part of the larger federal enterprise architecture.
What the U.S. government discovered was that it could not share artifacts between departments, and could not be sure how new assets fit into the grand scheme of things. This excited software architects—those who want to put the engineering into software engineering—but didn’t do much for project managers and developers. There still was a big disconnect between the diagrams and the coders who only looked at them once in a while.
The Open Group and the Object Management Group are trying to improve the connection by working together to create an architecture that drives development. Last month, they announced a joint effort to bring OMG’s Model Driven Architecture (MDA) together with The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) and released a white paper detailing the work.
“Early on, we recognized the architecture has to be connected to development, or else you’re just creating mountains of paper,” said Terry Blevins of The Open Group. “TOGAF tells you how to do architecture, but it doesn’t prescribe how to create architecture artifacts. The MDA approach produces a good architecture model done in an independent layer. They’re quite complementary.”
So why do this now? Fred Waskiewicz, who has been working on architecture languages for a long time, said, “From the OMG standpoint, MDA specifications started to appear. There’s UML for describing architecture, and MOF, for describing metadata and metamodels. That’s the level architects work at. It’s all coming into play now.”
But does enterprise architecture need MDA? Jan Popkin of Popkin Software, an acknowledged leader in the enterprise architecture solutions space, doesn’t think so. “I think this is another notable effort to take EA down a value chain, another use case for enterprise architecture,” he said of The Open Group-OMG work. But he said MDA needs EA, not the other way around. “The promise of moving the design down to the executable is a great opportunity, but it’s not a justification for EA. It has a lot of other legs it stands on,” he added, citing efforts by OASIS (Business Process Execution Language) and BPMI.org (Business Process Modeling Notation) as ways to get visualizations of the business goals and assets down into executables.
Meanwhile, IBM has begun talking up enterprise architecture through its Rational tools division.
“Our customers have been building software effectively, but they might now understand how their software all fits together,” said Dave West, group manager for industry solutions at IBM Rational. “Businesses want to build a series of views of their systems, to determine what elements of the computer system fulfill their business needs.” West said banking organizations, and others with large portfolios of software assets, have begun to start thinking in this way.
“Developers aren’t talking about EA. Program managers and project managers are talking about it. CIOs are realizing the benefit,” West added. “A startling concern of mine is that organizations understand what they spend on IT—software, hardware, wages—but they can’t map it to their business systems.”
West said IBM Rational is trying to introduce process and discipline higher up in an organization, using as an analogy the difference between house planning and town planning. “Organizations have good people to build houses, and they build good houses. But where are the roads to support it, and where are the plumbing lines?”
As for developers buying into the program, OMG’s Waskiewicz said, “Certainly, developers suffer the consequences of poorly architected systems. Unless they enjoy sitting at a computer terminal 24x7, their lives will be made better both personally and professionally” by enterprise architectures. “Their work projects will be more interesting, and the horrible errors that lead to throwing out months of work can be avoided. It’s a disciplined software engineering approach to application systems development.”
Enterprise architecture clearly is not for every enterprise. In small organizations, the business and IT links can be held in a few heads. For now, it’s the large enterprises, where IT is a substantial budget item, where there is a need to have understanding from the boardroom down to the technicians. Only time will tell how widely it’s adopted, and which effort ultimately gains the most traction.
David Rubinstein is editor of SD Times. |
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