January 25,
1999
Architecture Changes Everything
By Karyl Scott
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f you haven't made a New Year's resolution yet, you might consider taking the first steps toward
adopting an enterprise architecture. Doing so will have a profound effect on your organization. An
enterprise architecture is a master blueprint that takes into account everything from business
and technical processes that influence application development, to the logical and physical
makeup of your systems.
The leading textbooks on the subject say an architecture should be independent or higher level than the actual hardware and software implemented in your environment, although actual IT architects say that's not entirely feasible. At some point, the architecture must connote the actual types of hardware and applications you have in place.
According to Mohsen Farry, a director of software development at Reuters, which builds financial systems for customers such as Charles Schwab, architecture is a grand plan from which all development flows. It must take into account existing systems and new systems, says Farry. In Reuters' case, having a unifying architecture lets this consulting company become part of the customer's enterprise. It's the common framework, which lets Reuters collaborate with customers, he says.
From an organizational perspective, an enterprise architecture links an organization's IT strategy and its business goals. It also creates a shared vision for the company, taking into account the business drivers behind technology initiatives.
Every IT department should have some sort of information architecture, no matter how small it is. In a recent InformationWeek Research survey of 150 IT managers, 77% said they viewed their architecture as the key ingredient in building and evolving their enterprise systems. In another InformationWeek Research survey of 200 IT managers, respondents listed the key inhibitors to deploying new applications: pressure for deployment, complexity, poor communications with business managers during the requirements phase of development, and skills availability. While a good architecture clearly will not solve all of these challenges, it will address most of them by giving business and IT a common point of reference and by giving developers a set of common goals.
An enterprise architecture will tell you where you are today with current systems and help you evolve those systems and add new capabilities. It should also help the IT department set standards that new systems will adhere to, which will streamline the deployment of new application and the integration of disparate systems.
Setting up an enterprise architecture requires lots of up-front work, and to date, only the largest, most affluent, and forward-looking IT departments have done so. Those that have established an architecture have achieved tremendous dividends in rapid deployment, cost savings, and systems integration.
Charles Schwab implemented an architecture, one element of which was a plan for component reuse. It has taken close to three years to fully implement, but an internal audit indicates that the IT department saved about a $1 million through code reuse, says James Chong, Schwab's VP of architecture.
An enterprise architecture provides a commonality of purpose among developers. It also helps produce common results among multiple reporting applications, databases, and other strategic systems. An architecture defines consistent data structures, business rules, and data objects -- and helps keep all of this information in sync as systems evolve. An architecture also helps support iterative development and code reuse, two of the driving forces in application development today. Code written in accordance with an IT department's master plan will likely enjoy a longer life span and can be reused in many different projects because it adheres to architectural standards.
Many high-level application development, testing, and deployment tools are starting to embrace many of the principles of architecture design. As these tools evolve and mature, they should help IT managers streamline and automate the implementation of a master plan.
So if you've been putting off this monumental task, do yourself and your department a favor and take the first step to developing your organization's master blueprint for application development.
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