Systems Architecture
A good enterprise architecture view of the business provides the high-level vantage required to plan process and IT improvements. Architectures describe the overall deployment of applications, their interactions, their technologies, and their capacities. They typically display "big box" block-level interaction and major information interchanges between business functions.
Convergent Informatics describes architectures in Zachman, The Open Group Architecture Framework, Unified Modeling Language, and in the plain English our clients understand. The greatest value is in thinking through the business's overall structure and bringing it to light in the context of its technology deployments.
The difference between systems and enterprise architectures are often a matter of scope. All need to contain key elements of
Information endpoints: Define where critical business records reside and where the single point of truth (SPOT) exists.
System gaps: Find missing processes and applications or poor hand-offs between business systems.
System capacity and throughput constraints: How much work can these systems perform and how much are they being asked to do.
Infrastructure utilization: The application's resource consumption of the underlying infrastructure, if uncontrolled, can consume costs savings and the value of the application.
Deployment models and descriptions: For legacy applications, many times the extent of its deployment and dependencies are unknown. Where dependencies exist, there also lie hidden failures.
Operational and business costs: Accounting for the non-infrastructure resource consumption is necessary to monitor total ownership costs.
Systems designs are sometimes confused with architectures. Convergent Informatics designs and writes systems designs and specifications using Unified Modeling Language (UML), and these detailed descriptions are meant to roll up into overall systems architecture models.
Next: Information Governance
