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Urbanization and Enterprise Architecture

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History and context		 puce
IS Urbanization		 puce
Enterprise Architecture		 puce
Joining Enterprise Architecture & IS Urbanization

 

History and context

The constant evolution of markets, the search of an always stronger competitiveness and the growing role of information technologies require the evolution of Information Systems (IS) to be fast.

But the legacy systems are the result of the piling up of successive generations of applications, often interlinked, with redundancies and inconsistencies.

The growing complexity of this legacy generates more and more difficulties to make the IS evolve in order to fulfil the different business needs.

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IS Urbanization

To solve this issue, a group of large French companies developed a top-down approach of IS urbanization aiming to:

  • Improve the IS upgradeability and its adequacy with the processes,
  • Highlight the transverse and common functions and share them
  • Reinforce the IS consistency

Urba-eaThe stake of the urbanization is to make consistent the different views of IS:

  • The business view of IS, which deals with the business processes (that contribute to strategy)
  • The functional view of IS, which offers a target framework for information, functions and services needed to execute the business processes: an equivalent of land register for the IS
  • The data processing view of IS, which deals with the applications that implement the functions; and it is linked with the technical infrastructure allowing to operate them.

IS Urbanization promotes principles for IS changes:

  • Principle of information consistency concerning master data,
  • Principle of modularity for application sets.
  • And, by analogy with city planning of a town, it promotes the principle of subsidiarity :
    • city planning of the IS has the ambition to share the functions or services that guarantee the consistency,
    • set up an evolution framework for the "local" systems in which they can take their own decisions with the largest possible autonomy.

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Enterprise Architecture

Through its objectives, the nature of its work and the approach followed, Enterprise Architecture involves approaches that are well known in France, such as Information systems planning, Process Management and process optimisation and also covers the Strategic Alignment of Information Systems and processes.

During the same time IS urbanisation become widespread in France, the Anglo-Saxon world developed a set of concepts to face the same issue: the Enterprise Architecture (EA), which met a broad consensus.

EA is an approach based on a global modelling of all the business resources (actors, processes, applications, technical architectures…).

John Zachman has developed this approach since 1987 and he promoted a framework that contains a classification of the different models needed by professionals of business architecture, information systems and technology when they conceive, validate, simulate and create solutions.

The power of this analysis tool consists in the segmentation of various enterprise resources according to various necessary views (see: urbanization):

  • Scope (Context?)
  • Business Model (Concepts?)
  • System Model (Logic?)
  • Technology Model (Physics?)
  • Component Configuration…

and to various questions of every enterprise project:

  • What? (data)
  • How? (function)
  • Where? (network)
  • Who? (people)
  • When? (time)
  • Why? (motivation)

Although the technology has evolved, this framework remains relevant to place the various models or plans necessary for the design of a target, as for the follow-up to the evolutions. This framework has become a reference in EA. The position of any large-scale project with respect to the cells of the Zachman framework synthesizes its contribution.

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Joining Enterprise Architecture & IS Urbanization

Enterprise Architecture & IS Urbanization are convergent and consistent approaches:

  • segmentation of enterprise resources to model IS visions: from processus to IT.
  • progressive implementation
  • modularity
  • …

Enterprise Architecture & IS Urbanization deal in similar ways with same questions and same needs of Enterprises concerning IS improvements and changes:

  • Align IS with business stakes
  • Build quality IS solutions faster and more flexible
  • Manage less expensive changes

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