Evolutionary Systems Architectures in the Enterprise
Mark Cioni, M. Joe Zhou, Massimo Rolle
SchlumbergerSema 6399 South Fiddler’s Green Circle
Suite 600 Englewood, CO 80111
Abstract
Twenty-first century organizations face myriad factors influencing their business and
technical environments. Mergers, divestitures, new opportunities and globalization, as
well as emerging technologies and solutions, contribute to unprecedented levels of
change, and organizations must be ready to quickly capitalize on this change. The key
to adaptability is an evolutionary systems architecture that can enable the organization
to rapidly respond to business and technical influencers in a way that parallels strategic
goals.
This presentation focuses on several important evolutionary systems architecture areas.
First, we explore the most important holistic factors to balance when making
architectural decisions. Next, we examine in detail several evolutionary models and
their implementation. Finally, we discuss the future state of an evolutionary architecture
in the implementing organization.
Introduction
Electrical utilities today are experiencing an interesting time of change. Deregulation of
the industry in the United States, although varying from state to state, has forced utilities
to become much more competitive and adaptable to change. Some of the more
aggressive organizations are taking advantage of deregulation and are thriving through
innovative business process re-engineering and enabling technologies. Others are
treading water with caution and skepticism. Regardless of the stage of deregulation for
a given utility, many are looking to their IT infrastructure as one of their main competitive
tools in this new landscape. However, not all utilities are approaching their IT initiatives
with a holistic mindset and implementing them with consistent and systematic methods.
Some initiatives are driven by business and technical values and constraints, some are
required under their deregulation environment and still others may be implemented to
leverage cutting-edge technology. Consequently, utilities have seen their business
process models, IT infrastructure, systems and applications become increasingly more
heterogeneous. This, in turn, has tended to make the integration of systems and
applications in such an environment more complex, expensive and difficult to maintain.
Standards such as XML, Common Information Model (CIM) and the work done by the
IEC TC57 Working Group 14 have made progress toward enabling a more systematic
integration approach based on a common information exchange model.
An enterprise integration framework must also embrace a hybrid approach relative to
technology, where solution components such as application servers, Message Oriented
Middleware (MOM), integration brokers and other building blocks support a multitude of
integration scenarios. In this model, the organization’s business processes, integration
scenarios, message definitions and integration components are not only reusable, but
also extensible, with the goal of enabling a more agile and responsive enterprise that
can capitalize on business opportunities while optimizing Total Cost of Ownership
(TCO) and time to market. Such a framework requires a rigorous architectural and
engineering effort, a strongly focused integration team and, as always, support from
executive management and key stakeholders throughout the organization.
Deregulation Requires Integration
The recent problems that have surfaced from the California deregulation environment
have dampened the pace and extent of deregulation across the United States.
However, the fundamental business strategies of preparing and positioning for
deregulation, however and whenever it arrives, have remained and even grown in
importance. Strategies such as mergers and acquisitions, disaggregation of vertically
integrated utilities, preparing for customer choice, outsourcing and eBusiness all require
some level of IT investment to realize their business benefits. In most cases, these
strategies require a large degree of systems integration or even disintegration.
Deregulation represents a major change to operations and leads to changes in the
existing IT infrastructure. Therefore, it is likely that utilities preparing for deregulation
will face more integration requirements and challenges. How can utilities better position
themselves using their IT infrastructures to face the challenges of systems integration
needs driven by deregulation?
10 Principles of an Enterprise Integration Architecture Framework
1. Understand organizational business drivers
An integration framework must be developed within the context of business strategies
and goals. Business domains in 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.
2. 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”)
and the processes that tactically enable them (the “how”) provides the crucial foundation
for evolving the integration architecture framework.
3. 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.
4. 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. Because 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.
