The Urgent Need for Tools

The least computerized part of any organization is probably the IT application development organization. But wait a minute! Don't they have expensive PCs at every desk, networked together, and equipped with expensive software development tools? Well, yes. Yet many are still in the cottage industry stage of industrialization. It's as if a group of engineers were asked to build a new model of automobile, using their tools of trade welding torches, lathes, shears, and so on. A design is given to them, detailed to the last nut and bolt, but there's no production line tailored to produce the architectural approach of "family auto." So they build their own production line (or infrastructure), devoting 80 percent of their efforts to it and only 20 percent to producing the required number of autos. When they finish, way over budget and time, their production line is thrown away because it was built for that one particular model.

In the same way, application developers may have good tools and deep skills, but without an architectural approach to inform, constrain, and define their efforts, each project must define its own enterprise architecture, as well as produce its own infrastructure, "glue" code, process customization, and so on (the production line). Today's tools support specific skills and techniques, usable across different architectural approaches. However, we do not have tools that support a specific architectural approach what might be called "architecture support tools." Perhaps this is why our development processes are so fragmented: A usable process is specific to an architectural approach. Hence any general-purpose process must require extensive tailoring and customization. When was the last time you saw a general-purpose Customer Relationship Management (CRM) process marketed as the answer for your CRM people's process needs? To be effective, processes must be specific down to the bottom-level procedures, and they must be oriented to producing the thing you want to produce. Lack of such orientation is why over-heavy processes, many of which seem to be (and indeed are) purposeless, are being widely rejected today.

We need tools that support the architectural approach required by enterprise systems. This book describes many of the requirements for such tools.



Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture, A
A Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture
ISBN: 0131412752
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 148

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