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Tying it all together
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What is a business solution architecture?
Business Solution Architecture Development
The various steps in the development of the optimized business solution
architecture are defined in the section below.
- Strategic Direction
The BSA for the program is developed based on:
- Aligning cross-departmental objectives with greatly improved business benefits
- Knowledge of the available/selected technologies and their capabilities and limitations
- Identification of the scope of various types of work the processes need to cater for
- Identification of the many system islands that need to be eliminated due to the expensive duplicate data entry and resulting data inconsistencies
- Identification of the legacy systems that support the "blunt" areas of the business, which need to be retained as they are not cost-effective to replace
- The development of an integrated and elegant system architecture
- Required EDRP Technologies
For a utility, the suite of IS/IT technologies that can enable vast improvements in key Energy Delivery Resource Planning (EDRP) business processes include:
- Geographic Information System (GIS)
- Outage Management System (OMS)
- Mobile Workforce Management/ Mobile Data Terminals (MWM/ MDT)
- Distribution Planning & Analysis System (DPAS)
- Supervisory Control & Data Acquisition (SCADA)
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- Customer Information System (CIS)
- Energy Reading Management System (ERMS)
- Work & Asset Management System (WAMS)
- Materials Management (MMS)
- Contracting Management (CMS)
- Purchasing Management (PMS)
- Accounts Payable (AP)
- Financial Management and General Ledger (GL)
- Human Resource Management (HRM)
- Meaningful Business Requirements
The key end-to-end business processes are refined within the framework of a
best practice Integrated Business Process Model (IBPM). This IBPM is used to
define the high-level functionality, usability, and interfacing requirements for the
program scope. The system interface requirements take into account the
appropriate system to process mapping and the resulting data flow volume,
concurrency, and timing requirements.
- Technology & Vendor System Selection
Enabling IS/IT technologies should be objectively evaluated and selected based
on the support they provide for the enterprise's end-to-end business process
scenarios. Fit to business process scenarios is a far more effective criterion than
the more traditional demonstration of functionality. The evaluation needs to weigh
"essential" requirements far higher than "nice to have" requirements. It also
needs to identify any showstoppers. User evaluation ratings are multiplied by the
previously agreed weighing factors to provide an overall business requirement
rating. A similar process is followed for the other product criteria, such as:
- Technical architectural fit
- Vendor stability
- Cost
These product criteria are again combined using previously defined
criteria-weighing factors to provide the final product ranking. The business
requirement rating will generally have the highest criteria-weighing factor.
Provided the products meet the minimum acceptance level, they are short-listed
for inclusion into the vision system architecture.
As the business moves through the solution architecture/vendor selection
process there are some important considerations for management to evaluate.
There are trade-offs between individual system functionality and the contribution
to the support of end-to-end business processes and the number of integration
points required to integrate the system into the overall system architecture. It is
therefore important to evaluate the individual ratings of the individual systems
plus the overall system integration rating, considering the suitability for the
proposed integration strategy. From an integration strategy point of view, it has
been found that where more than four major systems are to be integrated, it can
be more cost-effective to move to a middleware integration strategy (compared to
the point-to-point interface strategy).
For the major system requirements, Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) systems
have much lower lifecycle management costs than custom development. COTS
systems also are able to be implemented more rapidly than custom development
and provide a much improved business case. COTS systems also have the
advantage of having an evolution path that provides ongoing system release
enhancements the business can take advantage of when it makes business
sense. The size and diversity of the COTS user community, plus the vendor's
development commitment, will determine the continued suitability of the systems
to be selected. Also, it is important to limit custom enhancements to an absolute
minimum to contain future upgrade cost.
There are also some generally accepted trade-offs between how many
best-of-breed systems need to be selected and integrated for a cost effective
business solution. The selection of too few systems generally results in a loss of
required functionality compared to the more focused COTS systems. For
progressive and competitive utilities, there are no "enterprise systems" available,
where they satisfactorily meet the focused processing needs covered by the
EDRP technologies listed above. Where vendors or consultants say they have
"THE enterprise system solution", it is recommended the support for the
processes covered by the list of EDRP technologies be evaluated and that a list
of reference sites be requested and visited where the scope of business
processes and scope of implementation can be demonstrated. When making
vendor selection decisions there may be a temptation to select a very large
integrated enterprise system with plans to customize certain modules in order to
"add back" some of the needed processing power of the best-of-breed systems.
The lifecycle cost of the selected scope of customization has a major impact on
the lifecycle cost and business case. It is recommended that add-on
functionality/customization to the basic product functionality and data structures
only be undertaken where it is essential and cost-effective.
The overall cost-effective system architecture needs to be developed at the large
EDRP level. The appropriate system to be used to support each IBPM process is
identified based on the end-to-end business process scenarios and assigned
user roles (not just because a system has a certain functionality should it be
used!). (This previous sentence is unclear.) This analysis defines the system
partitioning and likely interfacing requirements.
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