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Summary

The N1 Grid architecture accelerates capability and frees up IT organizations to focus on business needs. Policy and security impart the checks and balances to ensure that the actions and requests are properly controlled and channeled, but they require accurate information and enterprise process control to function.

This chapter described the types of measurements needed to translate customer needs and requirements into measurable characteristics (CTQs) and to understand the capabilities needed to collect, roll up, analyze, and use the CTQs and the N1 Grid business information throughout the service life cycle. Methods to measure and analyze CTQs were seen to support both the situations where advancement to the next phase of the architectural methodology is being considered , as well as to prepare for where ongoing observation of production environment must take place.

The examples should have helped you strengthen the requirements and SLRs captured for your N1 Grid solutions. The N1 Grid architecture enables new types of CTQs to be measured and delivered, enables input from an entirely new set of business stakeholders, and enables IT to align even closer to what the business needs. Use cases and SLRs can be elevated to support service life cycles and business policy over traditional compute, network, and storage activities.

Traceability provides the key to gathering, analyzing, validating, and verifying the requirements that you will use in architecture analysis and solution construction. A set of final requirements is only a beginning step to a final architecture and running solution because the architecture methodology should be open to accept new information from the architecture analysis and solution verification phases.

You should now be equipped to establish the measurable success criteria for your N1 Grid software engagement. Chapter 6 discusses the next steps to take: analyzing the prioritized requirements, constraints, and assumptions of your business in preparation for an N1 Grid architecture and design.