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Systems Architectures
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Evolutionary Systems Architectures in The Enterprise
Ten Principles of an Enterprise Integration Architecture Framework
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Understand organizational business drivers
An integration framework must be developed within the context of business strategies and goals.
Business domains within the organization must be understood and leveraged both in their own
context and within the larger consideration of the organization’s business strategy. This
understanding is the guiding light of any systems integration effort.
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Know the integrated business processes
Understanding business strategies and domains drives the need to understand the business
processes used to achieve these goals. Business processes must be understood from the
standpoint of integration, both at the process and systems levels. Business events that either
trigger a business process or arise as a result of a process must be understood. Integrated
business process models will serve as both the blueprint and the scope for the subsequent
integration work. These models should ideally be modularized so that they can be flexible
enough to adapt to future changes driven by deregulation. Understanding the business drivers
(the “What” and the “Why”) as well as the processes that tactically enable them (the “How”)
provides the crucial foundation for evolving the integration architecture framework.
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Start with an architectural blueprint
An enterprise integration architecture must balance best practices and strong principles with
organizational values and constraints. Just like building a city, there will be tradeoffs along the
way to reconcile principles with pragmatics and still achieve business goals in a way that
optimizes cost and time to market. Equally as important, the concept of architecture is broadened
to apply to the organizational domains of business, technology and organization because of their
myriad interdependencies. Harmonizing these domains improves the chances for architectural
success.
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Have a centralized integration management and project team
A key component of the framework is organizing the development and ongoing support
initiatives for enterprise integration. Since integration touches many business domains, processes
and systems within a utility, a centralized organization that can coordinate and lead these efforts
increases the chances for success. Obviously, the amount of authority and support that this
organization has from the rest of the business is key to its chances for success.
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Define a framework for common information exchange
Interface and data requirements must be studied for the processes, systems and applications to be
integrated. From an enterprise perspective, much of the reusability and efficiency of integration
come from having a common information exchange model. Many standards, some of which are
horizontal, such as XML and OAG, and some of which are utility-specific, such as CIM and
WG14, have made a great deal of progress toward providing solutions vendors, and ultimately
utilities, with useful frameworks. Much of the work done to date by these standards groups is
readily accessible and available to leverage, and the underlying implementation technologies
provide the ability to adapt as these standards undergo further evolution and ratification. Also,
defining a common information exchange model is different from defining a corporate data
model, as many utilities have done. The organization needs to focus on the information exchange
between systems and applications with traceability to business process, and not simply
intra-application information requirements.
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Select technologies that enable good architectural principles
Various enterprise application integration technologies have been maturing for several years.
There are many vendors who supply specific components or the entire family of integration tools
needed for the enterprise-level integration needs, including A2A, B2C, B2B and other scenarios.
Conversely, newer technologies and standards are evolving at this moment, and maturity curves
are no longer just based on time. Organizations can commit to a specific vendor to provide
everything needed for integration, or they can select best-of-breed technologies to get the best fit
for their integration needs. Both strategies are viable, but the challenge is to ensure that the
technologies have the right balance of achieving “architectural goodness” with principles such as
scalability, security and extensibility with enabling the organizational goals.
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Walk, then run
Developing an enterprise integration architecture framework requires a rigorous engineering
effort. It also involves risks in both business and technology. To mitigate such risks,
organizations should take an iterative approach using prototypes and pilots to surface specific
issues and problems with the framework before it can become the corporate IT standard.
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Test for functionality and performance
The organization must allocate enough time and resources to test the functionality as well as the
performance of the integration framework in the production environment. A flexible and
reusable framework at the technical level often comes with an unacceptable tradeoff relative to
performance. The framework must balance performance and flexibility, which means that the
required level of performance should also be documented at the time of process and messaging
definition.
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