70 © Journal of Enterprise Architecture – May 2011

Article

Streamlining IT Application Selection and Integration with a Standard Modeling Language

By Iver Band

Abstract

IT customers, application providers, and system integrators generally do not use standard representations to describe either application requirements or proposals to satisfy them. The resulting ambiguity exposes application selection and integration processes, however well-structured and executed, to error and delay. Adoption of the ArchiMate

® visual

modeling language, an Open Group standard, would therefore increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the business application marketplace.

WHY ISN’T IT EASIER TO SELECT AND INTEGRATE APPLICATIONS?

By now, IT customer organizations should find selecting and integrating a major packaged or hosted application a lot easier than it actually is. Standards for common IT components, assemblies, and services are mature or steadily maturing, as are standards frameworks for many industries and functions. Tools and APIs for all phases of application development are generally rich, full-featured, and increasingly well-integrated. Custom development of entire applications has become less necessary for IT groups due to a wide variety of mature software packages and a growing number of hosted applications. Traditional IT challenges such as agile software development, project management, information security, and operations management are supported by broadly recognized methods and bodies of knowledge.

However, when IT customers select and integrate a major application involving diverse user communities and legacy applications, the pace of work often accelerates as the pace of accomplishment slows to a crawl. Much of this difficulty stems from the complexity and ambiguity of integrating the contributions of stakeholders with diverse perspectives, responsibilities, and intentions. To select applications, customers and their consultants typically use structured methods that collect and weigh application and vendor attributes against prioritized or weighted current and expected requirements. Some even construct conceptual models of their current and desired states. However, since the same words or pictures can mean different things to different people, ambiguity is unavoidable. As a result, it is often difficult to predict the progress or ultimate impact of selection processes due to instability and misunderstandings concerning application scope, requirements, and key stakeholders. Selection teams

can resolve these ambiguities, but often only after lots of churn and rework.

Involving application providers only intensifies this challenge. Crafting an RFP, answering respondents’ questions, and clarifying their responses all add additional perspectives and agendas, as does system integrator selection and subsequent collaboration. Indeed, many vendors task very different people with initial relationship-building, responding to RFIs and RFPs, and delivering formal customer presentations. The customer must therefore reconcile a variety of graphic, written, and spoken material from different sources.

HOW CAN APPLICATION SELECTION AND INTEGRATION BECOME EASIER?

What could be done to enhance the certainty, efficiency, and velocity of the IT applications marketplace? Participants could use standard representations of IT application supply and demand that use graphics as well as text. Both customers and vendors could use ArchiMate, The Open Group standard visual modeling language for enterprise architecture, to represent business, data, application, and technology architectures, as well as architectures that combine and relate these layers. As of this writing, the ArchiMate 2.0 extensions for expressing motivations and implementation plans are nearing ratification, and some enterprise architecture practitioners are working with them already.

If customers modeled their conceptual application architectures and application requirements using ArchiMate, application providers could respond in kind. Certainly, free-form customer-supplier interaction would still be necessary, but a commonly understood model would organize and focus these exchanges. Customers could better orient application providers with models that associate requirements with broader concerns and key

© Journal of Enterprise Architecture – May 2011 71

stakeholders, as well as critical business capabilities and processes. Customers requiring implementation plans could tie requirements and conceptual system architectures to specific projects within broader programs.

Application providers could respond by elaborating customer models with their proposed applications and integration approaches. Both customers and application providers would benefit from the precision and re-usability of these models. Customers and their system integrators would have a head start on their target application architectures, and application providers could re-use them for subsequent proposals. The selection process would also prepare customers and system integrators to expedite application integration by building on a shared model.

ArchiMate can be easily styled or extended to meet the needs of particular industries, functions, organizations, or methodologies. Modelers can add metadata to the objects represented by its symbols, and can even add or replace symbols. In these cases, the extending party just needs to provide a reference that explains its styles or extensions to its trading partners. Eventually, the mapping of ArchiMate to the Object Management Group (OMG) XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) standard will allow direct translation of ArchiMate models into other languages.

IT CUSTOMER ORGANIZATIONS CAN LEAD THE WAY

ArchiMate 1.0 is a recent (2009) standard, and many in the IT industry have not even heard of it, but IT customers have the power to drive mainstream adoption. They can use ArchiMate in their application selection and integration efforts, and require or encourage vendors to respond in kind.

ArchiMate is fairly intuitive, and diagrams with well-labeled symbols are therefore broadly comprehensible with minimal introduction. The language is supported by a number of major modeling tools, and is compatible with a wide range of architecture development methodologies. I have used ArchiMate diagrams with vendor representatives as well as senior executives in both IT and user organizations, and have found that they work at least as well as diagrams with non-standard graphics. Also, it is easy to identify ArchiMate symbols by annotating them the first time they are used, or by providing simple legends or even brief verbal explanations. Therefore, vendors should not be afraid to take the initiative to use ArchiMate diagrams in proposals and project deliverables, even if the customer has not requested it. Enterprise architects and other professional modelers, however, should prepare themselves with self-study or formal training. Also, a wide range of IT professionals and influential user

representatives should receive basic instruction in reading ArchiMate diagrams.

If more IT customers, application providers, and system integrators embrace ArchiMate, they will increase the effectiveness and efficiency of their own organizations, their trading partners, and ultimately the IT applications marketplace. Verifying these improvements could be the subject of future research as ArchiMate gains broader acceptance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Iver Band is an enterprise architect at Standard Insurance Company, where he works on next-generation customer service solutions as well as enterprise architecture methodology and tools. He also participates in The Open Group ArchiMate Forum. Iver joined Standard Insurance in 2008 after 16 years at HP, where his roles included software and IT engineering, architecture, and management. At HP, he was also the second Visiting Technologist at HP Labs, where he led the development of a patented method for managing network access control.