Harness Technology Architecture
Modeling is the key to effectively communicating and establishing your technology architecture.
by Jeff Tash, ITscout

September 1, 2004

How screwed up is your IT organization? Do you find yourself often wondering how anything related to IT ever gets accomplished inside your own enterprise? The problem, invariably, is the complexity of IT itself. Always remember that no one likes to admit what they don't understand.

In the world of computing, with its constantly churning technological innovations, most IT professionals walk around like they're stepping on eggshells. Most everyone who works in IT is constantly afraid others are going to somehow discover just how ignorant they often feel.

IT is unlike any other business discipline. For instance, consider accounting. Accountants still use the same basic double-entry bookkeeping approach developed hundreds of years ago by the Italians during the Renaissance. Similarly, Dale Carnegie's sales training courses are just as applicable today as they were when he first taught them during the Great Depression. In fact, the basic principles underlying engineering, manufacturing, marketing, and so forth, are not too fundamentally different from what they were 30 years ago.

But then there's computing...

With computing, the pace of change is staggering. For the last quarter century, we've witnessed the emergence of radically new innovations such as relational databases, personal computers, graphical user interfaces, client/server distributed computing, object-oriented programming, and of course, the World Wide Web.

Looking ahead, the next generation of technologies pushing the proverbial envelope includes XML, service-oriented architecture (SOA), Web services, and the Semantic Web. Collectively, these new technologies will fundamentally reshape how businesses conduct transactions. But first, IT needs to learn how to design systems that operate asynchronously.

Communicate Your Technology Architecture
How does your IT organization stay current? How does IT re-educate its staff? What about all those other people throughout the enterprise who aren't IT professionals but who use IT systems and services?

Bottom line: In most enterprises today, the IT organization does a horrific job of communicating with people—both internal staff as well as external users.

You must communicate your technology architecture. Unfortunately, in too many organizations, enterprise architects fail miserably in conveying to others what technology to use and why.

Computing should always strive to achieve four basic objectives:

1. Simplicity
2. Standards
3. Modularity
4. Integration

These properties consistently have been the key drivers pushing forward each of the previously mentioned IT breakthroughs. I can't overstate the importance of embracing these four properties.

You can best accomplish the pursuit of simplicity, standards, modularity, and integration by following a simple four-step process:

1. Categorization
2. Standardization
3. Communication
4. Education

Ability to Model
The most important critical success factors for achieving categorization, standardization, communication, and education, especially with regard to harnessing technology architecture, is the ability to model. An IT organization's technology architecture is best reflected by a three-layer, four-model representation:

1. IT infrastructure (bottom layer; see Figure 1)
2. Application development (middle layer)
3. Commercial, off-the-shelf applications (middle layer)
4. Business intelligence (top layer)

The bottom layer of a three-layer technology architecture (see Figure 1) reflects an enterprise's IT infrastructure, composed of:

• Clientware (software that runs on clients)
• Serverware (software that runs on servers)
• Middleware (software that provides the glue between clients and servers)
• Platforms (the underlying hardware and operating systems)
• Manageware (software for managing operational environments)

Of course, infrastructure, by itself, doesn't do much of anything. You achieve value only after layering applications on top of the infrastructure. You can either build or buy applications. As such, the middle layer of a technology architecture must address applications, regardless of whether you develop or purchase them.

Finally, regardless of whether you build or buy them, applications generate data, the top level in a three-layer technology architecture. Of particular importance with respect to data is the ability to mine for business intelligence.

Models are the key to mastering complexity. Consider how difficult it would be to travel from one city to another without the aid of a roadmap. Think about how impossible it would be to construct a building without first developing blueprints. Imagine developing a calendar or tide tables without a model of our solar system. In fact, the most important human knowledge is passed from generation to generation based on models. Without models, people would be no better off than rats in a maze.

Models, which represent levels of abstraction, are also the key to mastering computing. It's possible to program computers using machine language or assembly language, but you wouldn't want to do that. That's why we saw the invention of higher-level languages such as Java or BASIC, which employ much higher levels of abstraction. Similarly, data models allow for the representation of real-world entities, such as employees, customers, and parts. Object models extend data models by describing not only the data fields representing real-world objects, but also the operations you can perform on those objects.

Technology architecture is also all about models. Its primary purpose is to provide the big-picture view that enables people to understand how the various parts of computing fit together holistically. It's like the German word gestalt, which literally means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. People desperately need a meaningful way to think about the entirety of IT—how all the myriad pieces fit together to form an understandable whole. The absence of a good, effective cognitive roadmap renders people bewildered and confused, forced to learn by trial and error. On the other hand, the existence of an understandable technology architecture model enables people to benefit from the knowledge and experience of others.

The quality of an enterprise's technology architecture is probably the best predictor of how well IT performs. CIOs must make the specification and communication of their enterprises' technology architectures high-priority requirements. That's the most important aspect of their organizations' enterprise architectures.

About the Author
Jeff Tash is CEO of Flashmap Systems. He's also creator of the Flashmap Roadmap series of wall posters that cover IT infrastructure, business intelligence, application development, and commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) applications. Register on Jeff's personal Web site, www.ITscout.org, for interactive versions of Jeff's roadmap models.