Democratization of Architecture

Many IT professionals know they should do their architectures. How can you build a system, or preferably a capability, without an articulated architecture to backstop it? But UML is a complex inscrutable art. The tools to weild it can be daunting. So very few IT professionals, going by the name architect, actually build them. Most times, when built, they are a snapshot of whatwas wanted and are sent to the bookshelf to live out a long life.

It is with this as context that we undertook an effort, about 6 months ago, that we now understand as 'the democratization of architecture' - making it safe for the masses. The gist is that we wanted to accomplish 2 things:

1. Lower barriers to entry

2. Make IT capabilities more accessible at design time

Using a simple spreadsheet input approach we eased the entry barriers into a real UML tool, Rational Software Architect (RSA). Now we can consume customers' mission elements via a simple excel spreadsheet breakout. Customers sit with client personnel and talk about their 5-7 major mission elements that they need in the solution. Next they break each of those down to its constituent parts, and so on down to 4 or 5 levels of detail. RSA consumes these mission elements and produces a strategic mission model - simple, done!

On the IT capabilities side, we've done a market survey. For each of the major IT capabilities groups, e.g., Security, User Experience, Development Tools, Information Managment, Transactional Management or Enterprise Service Management. See pic below

.Basically all the horizontal middleware capabilities, we build simple models. These models were labelled using the customers' vernacular - the way they talk about these capabilities.

Now that we have consumed the mission elements & have resident the IT capabilities, we can produce a simple set of spreadsheets, one for each IT capabilties group. However, we can also put in juxtaposition, to the IT capabilties, the mission elements.

See pic for service management example of RSA produced spreadsheet that maps mission elements (columns) against the IT capabilities (rows). This simple form allows the user to sit with a client person and map IT capabilities, that could satisfy requirements, against the corresponding mission elements.

The cells, where IT capabilties and mission elements intersect, is where we note the correspondence. A simple x in the intersecting cell is all that is needed. Now, if we have a statement about that relationship, then that can be easily entered, in the cell, and will show up on the actual UML model. Once the six xlses are filled out (reference 6 pieces of the core above) then using a simple RSA plug-in (authored by Fred Mervine, the Grandaddy of this Democratization effort) we re-c0nsume the IT capabilities crossed with mission elements and produce a UML joint capabilities diagram. Essentially we join the mini-models from each sheet into one overall model that shows the collection of relationships. UML was never this easy (for the client).

A real UML jock, at this point, can take that joint capabilities diagram and decorate it with NFRs, sequences, and other essential architectural elements and produce a final actionable architecture. However, what we've done is to ease the process of IDing the basic mission elements in the solution and IDing the basic COTS architectural elements needed to satisfy those requirements. Architecture for everyone.