Annette Lerine Steenkamp is Program Director of the Doctoral Program in Management of Information Technology and Professor in Computer and Information Systems in the College of Graduate Management at the Lawrence Technological University, Southfield, Michigan. She holds a PhD in Computer Science specializing in Software Engineering. She teaches Information Technology Architectures and Information Technology Life Cycle Processes in the doctoral program, and have lead a large number of projects in these areas. She also directs a research program for doctoral students focused on enterprise architecture, knowledge management and approaches to process improvement in organizations. She collaborates with industry on initiatives to improve the education and learning of IT professionals for more than 25 years.

Presentation
Case Studies: an Approach to Modeling Architectural Viewpoints for Real-world Problems.

The field of Enterprise Architecture is receiving much attention in today’s global market place where companies collaborate on joint ventures, and the enterprise system extends beyond the company. Partners, suppliers and customers form part of the greater enterprise system. The enterprise system consists of diverse assets that may be represented in terms of a hierarchy of architectures. It is important for the enterprise to be able to model its existing architectures and use it as a blueprint to respond to drivers and trends in todays competitive environment. A range of frameworks, process models and methodologies have been proposed but most are not integrated and there is no universally accepted standard at this time, although several standards bodies such as IEEE and ISO have developed standards that address aspects of the architectural domain. The Open Group has made a large contribution towards architectural integration through TOGAF. We need an architectural approach to provide an integrated architectural capability.

The application of theories of enterprise and Information Technology architectures to practice are of interest to practitioners and educators alike. In this presentation experiences on real-world projects, documented as case studies, will be shared with architects, managers and developers in the field.

The presentation will start by giving an overview of the key tenets of an architecture approach to developing the enterprise architecture. This approach will be compared with the TOGAF approach in the presentation. The tenets are:

• the principles and concerns driving architectural decisions.
• an architecture framework which provides an analytical schema for considering viewpoints, views and models constituting the enterprise architecture. (This will be compared to the TOGAF Foundation Components and IEEE1471 in the presentation.)
• An architecture process model. (This will be compared to TOGAF ADM in the presentation.)
• An architecture methodology. (This will be compared to TOGAF ADM in the presentation.)

This overview will be followed with a discussion of educational architecture projects that were based on realworld projects in a large automotive company. The architectural approach followed in these projects to develop architecture viewpoints, including the models for the information, business systems, application, technology viewpoint - communications engineering, and security viewpoints will be described.

The second part of the presentation will focus on the mobility viewpoint and will review the mobility enterprise architecture approach which we developed in a doctoral research project.

A demonstration is available and may be shown after the presentation if there is interest. This case study was developed with Provision Workbench.

Attendees will benefit by

• Understanding the role of an architecture framework when strategizing in the organization.
• Knowing how the information and business system architectures support the creation of an IT strategy.
• Learning about an integrated architecture approach to developing the viewpoints of the enterprise architecture.

Organizations will benefit from attendees understanding of:

• What principles and concerns should be considered when developing the enterprise architecture?
• Who makes architectural decisions and who are the stakeholders?
• The architectural process within the context of IT enablement of business processes.

After the session attendees will be able to:

• Align an architectural project with the IT strategy
• Plan and manage an architectural project
• Explain software development processes are integrated with architectural processes?

return to program