Trinity of Business architecture, information architecture, technology architecture

Customers call every day to modify product features, a simple requirement may be done for one months. The more bulky the product, the more and more bugs to catch the time limit. Headache！

Products from the primary version to now four years, the relevant programmers come and go for three batches, patching on the patch is often the case, a lot of functions just opened a head, another project manager is forgotten. We are always afraid of customers in this product to put forward new requirements, as long as customers still use the past, can not change it. The limitations of these rigid codes can be tolerated even if they are not changed.

Yesterday just on the function, and suddenly to remove. The customer is using these processes in the product, is no one to consider beforehand? Now say this function is important, and said to do a variety of interfaces and extensions, the demand backlog to this extent, I'm sorry! The code has been fixed.

Come out and mix it up sooner or later.

In the early days, our clients didn't understand what information technology could bring to him or change anything. With the passage of time, the enterprise information layer in-depth, and even has evolved into the enterprise in the market competition, the reversal of the situation appeared. Enterprise customer's business process from the previous adaptation software, gradually changed to let the software to adapt to the development of the enterprise. So the same software customers put forward a variety of personalized needs, add functions, change processes, maintenance optimization and so on.

So how do we avoid these headaches?

The root cause of these problems is that the design and development of commercial software are not in line with the development requirements of enterprise informatization. Now most of the software on the market, is a few programmers with their own understanding of the business, to put together a variety of functions, in the early days of these software because of the gap, the enterprise did see the harvest, with the project and new demand for continuous production, the system maintenance pressure is growing, and the software business process and the development process of the actual process began to produce deviations, so the software in order to meet the requirements of enterprise information constantly modified, the final software becomes more and more cumbersome, resulting in many new business processes can not be implemented, the code has not moved, So this set of so-called enterprise information System can solve most of the fixed program business, enterprise information into the tangled period.

However, the enterprise has tasted the sweetness of information, in a strong market interest driven, more and more software vendors are not blindly entangled, began to launch the so-called "customer", that is, customer-oriented, collect customer needs, build a business framework before beginning to write code. This concept has not been quickly imitated, because the so-called "customization" is often the software manufacturers exhausted, software industry is a large number of users to replicate the industry to survive, to achieve real personalized services to bear the cost will be very large. So the concept of "customized" is only a technical framework.

Recently, based on the "customer", the "Business infrastructure Platform Software" is proposed.

According to the definition of information: Business architecture Platform Software is a business-oriented and driven, can quickly build application software platform. It includes two parts of integrated application platform and development system. From the point of view of technology, this platform software provides a basic framework for the development of complex application software system, and has the corresponding and convenient development and maintenance management tools. This framework gives the basic components and implementation methods of some complex application software, and preset many software modules for reference. With such preparation, the development of management software on top of the business infrastructure platform software can reduce complexity and save a lot of basic research and development work, thus greatly shortening the development cycle and improving the efficiency of research and development.

This "Business Architecture platform Software" is actually the "customer" in the form of functional modules. Through the customer's business base framework, software will have a lot of modular functions and extensible interface, on the one hand, customers can be based on their own business characteristics from the modular function pool to select the required functions; On the other hand, when the function of the pool is not enough to meet the needs of customers, through the modular extension interface, Programmers can quickly develop new features on the underlying platform. Let me give you a familiar example: wordpress This blog software is this "business infrastructure platform Software" Typical, on the one hand provides a lot of column modules and functions for Bo Master choice, and provide customization; On the other hand, because this is an open source platform, there will be a variety of applications that are quickly compatible. Our software does not need to open source to customers, do not expect customers to participate in development, but if the platform has a good business structure and technical framework, the software project team to do enhancements and changes as long as the modular on the line. As a result, the business architecture and technology architecture are placed at the same altitude, to avoid the development process to the technical architecture, the business architecture as a supplement, the business of architectural design before the early large-scale code writing.

The above has been emphasizing modularity, this is the key to "Business architecture platform Software", but this modularity, is still in the groping phase, Strees, each line of business processes are different, but we through a large number of process comparisons, is able to find some of the rules, the combination of these rules formed a module. Business Architecture and application architecture The author of this article has nowhere to look, but there's a passage. The modular description of the business architecture is worth learning: "The first look at architecture is easy to understand as static things, but the broad business architecture is static and dynamic analysis of the integration and integration, in the analysis process of mutual influence and promote each other." Dynamic information that we say the general value chain analysis of ideas, from the enterprise End-to-end to the first level of the process to each business area level two, three level and other processes analysis. Form one level process->-> Activity-> Activity Unit-> Task-> event's main line; for static information, it includes organization, people, posts, roles, business objects and forms, procedures, templates and other information. Static information focuses on the business domain and business object, that is, the formation of business domain-> Business domain-> Business module-> business Unit-> Business component of the static data decomposition by layer. Static information + dynamic information + interaction points and interface analysis to form a complete business framework. It can be seen that the combination of the activity cells after the process has been finely decomposed can form business components and business modules, at the same time, the business module itself has a more fine-grained process and activity decomposition, the business component itself is a part of multiple processes, so static and dynamic mutual integration, form interaction, so must analyze the interaction and interface. ”

In addition to these, the modular platform software under the Business architecture and technology architecture has the following characteristics:

1, user-centric

Users will become the leading information, they do not have to consider how to implement the technology, only need to understand their business processes, only to use the module pool function to assemble the target software to meet their own needs. So users can completely change the previous information process of passive status, so as to effectively guarantee the balance between software and requirements.

2. Agile development

Because of the modular interface and ductility, programmers do not need to start from scratch, as long as the use of the original module as the basis for development.

3, the synthesizer

When it comes to the concept of a functional pool, the software will be a platform that integrates a variety of systems, like a PC motherboard, with many slots, which are easily integrated, no matter what management system you want to build.

4, the life cycle is very long

Because of the establishment of the business architecture and technology architecture coordination mechanism, so its survival is to be able to adapt to the development of enterprises, through the agile development of the way to achieve the software lifecycle model. These factors have effectively driven the continuous improvement of software, fundamentally guaranteed the dynamic balance between management software and enterprise development, so that the software has a long life cycle.

While the business architecture and technology architecture are integrated, it is gradually discovered that because of the increasing application of enterprises, the diversity and complexity of enterprise application and the increasing demand of their direct interrelated interaction, more and more enterprises have risen from the application layer to the data layer, if the same as traditional software, the data stored in the system files, Then this so-called modular "business infrastructure software" is still unable to play his power.

At this point, the information system architecture should be referred to the business architecture and the technical framework of the height, coordinated solution. We call it "the Trinity of Business architecture, information architecture, technology architecture"

It is an honor to start from 2009, I have led a catering industry application software design and planning work. This 1.5 of the time, in the project team groping to find such an integrated approach to work. In fact, not three kinds of architecture are in the same place waiting for you, but walk to find problems, and then pick up one by one, finally found that in fact, the first three can be combined into one.

In the information architecture, we not only store enterprise data in the database, but also store it in a unified server, open as the data tier. Using C/s structure, so that customers and the server real-time interaction, the system records the customer's operational data, through the analysis of these data summed up to make the industry general business model. Customers through the link to the server, you can arbitrarily in the function pool to select their own modules.

IBM introduced its db2purexml said: "Because of this open service characteristics, this kind of core information in the service of a variety of business needs to consider a large number of differences and complexity, it is necessary to data storage and data access isolation." Data variability and complexity will require higher flexibility and scalability of the data model, and the isolation of data access and underlying storage will directly lead to more and more applications getting information through the XML service interface rather than directly accessing the underlying database tables using SQL. ”

Yes, that's why SaaS has become an industry trend, software should be "soft", it can adapt to the needs of enterprise development, and should not allow enterprises to adapt to software. Business architecture, information architecture, and technology architecture are also the essence of SaaS.

Today play the concept of the individual some sporadic views of the system, only to make a point. Thank you for your busy reading!

Source: http://www.pmday.com/archives/335