System Architect (software)

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For the systems architect software profession, see Systems architect.
System Architect

System Architect with BPMN and Network Diagrams Open and Browsed
Developed by Telelogic, An IBM Company
Latest release Version 11.0 with SP2 / Released April 28, 2008
OS Microsoft Windows
Website http://www.telelogic.com/products/systemarchitect/

System Architect is an enterprise architecture tool that is used by the business and IT departments of major commercial corporations, government civilian agencies, and government military agencies to build models of all aspects of their business operations and the systems, applications, and databases that support them. System Architect is used to build DoDAF architectures. The Architecture Development and Analysis Survey, conducted by MITRE Corporation for the US Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks & Information Integration (OASD NII) and revealed at the CISA worldwide conference on December 1, 2005, reported that out of 96 programs building DoDAF architectures responding to the survey, 77% used System Architect, either by itself (48%) or in conjunction with another modeling tool (29%).[1]

In building an enterprise architecture, users use System Architect to build diagrammatic and textual models of all aspects of their organization, including the who, what, where, when, why, and how things are done. The users building the models are typically enterprise architects, business architects, business analysts, data architects, software architects, and so forth. This information can be viewed by all stakeholders of the organization — including its workers, management, and outside vendors (depending on the level of access they've been granted to the information), through generation of the information to a static website, or enabling direct web-access to the information in the repository. The stakeholders can use this information to get answers to questions about the organization's architecture in the form of visual diagrams and reports that produce textual information, pie charts, and other dashboards.

System Architect has been referenced in textbooks written in the field of enterprise architecture, UML, and data modeling, and was also used to build some or all of the models that appear in some of these books.[2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Contents

[edit] History

System Architect was initially created and developed by Popkin Software, under the auspices of Jan Popkin, a pioneer in the development of Windows-based tools. Because of this history, many users know the tool as the Popkin tool or the Popkins tool. System Architect was one of the first Windows-based computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools[citation needed]. It evolved through the years to become one of the first in a new breed of enterprise architecture modeling tools — tools that enable the end user to use a wide breadth of notations and methods to capture and model all aspects of their organization in a repository, and disseminate this information to a large audience. System Architect is now developed by Telelogic, an IBM company.

[edit] Features

System Architect includes support for:

[edit] Technical overview

Graphic models and their underlying information are created and stored in a relational database in either SQL Server 2005, Oracle 10G, or SQL Server 2005 Express. For SQL Server, the information is stored in a database on the server; this database is considered a repository of information and in System Architect parlance is called an encyclopedia. For Oracle, the repository, or ‘encyclopedia’, is a schema on the Oracle database server.

Users build the models working together in teams on the network. In this multi-user environment, as one user opens a model artifact to edit it, other users get a read-only version of this artifact. Options exist to enable users to check out multiple artifacts so that they can work on sections of the architecture without anyone else modifying it while they work on it, and administrators to freeze artifacts so that they are ‘set in stone’. Users may also work in a stand-alone configuration using SQL Server 2005 Express on their laptop or workstation.

A SQL-based query reporting language enables users to build and run reports to answer questions about the information they have modeled, such as what business processes are related to what organizational goals, what applications are used to perform what business processes, what business processes operate on what data entities, what user has modified what information on what date, and so forth.

The information captured in the repository is done so against a metamodel that acts as a template for information to capture and how it is all related. Users may customize this metamodel, to change or add to the template of information they wish to capture and how things are interrelated.

Models are typically published to a website so that they can be viewed by a wide audience. An add-on tool called SA/Publisher is used to publish websites based on SQL-based queries of the repository using System Architect’s reporting language.

[edit] System Architect DoDAF and MODAF

System Architect provides support for the diagrams, matrices, and work products required to be captured for the Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF). There are two options to System Architect that are used by the DoDAF community – System Architect DoDAF and System Architect DoDAF ABM. The System Architect DoDAF ABM version has specific metamodel changes and utilities geared toward supporting the Activity Based Method (ABM) for building DoDAF artifacts, as specified by MITRE, who created the method.

Another variant of System Architect is the System Architect MODAF offering, which provides specific metamodel, diagrammatic, and byproduct (matrices and reports) support for the UK Ministry of Defence Architecture Framework (MODAF). Yet another variant of System Architect is the System Architect NAF product, which provides support for the NATO Architecture Framework.

[edit] SA/XT

A sister tool to System Architect, called System Architect/XT (where XT denotes eXtended Team) provides a web interface to read and write access to the repository. SA/XT enables remote users with a web browser to browse the repository, run reports against it to ask it questions, and add information into it.

[edit] References

  1. ^ The US Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (NII) Architecture Development and Analysis Survey, conducted by MITRE Corporation, and presented at the CISA worldwide conference on December 1, 2005.
  2. ^ Goikoetxea, Dr. Ambrose, PhD. Enterprise Architectures: Planning, Design, and Assessment. ISBN 978-9812700278. 
  3. ^ Whitten, Jeffrey L.; Lonnie D. Bentley, Kevin C. Dittman.. Systems Analysis and Design Methods. ISBN 025619906X. 
  4. ^ Chonoles, Michael Jesse; James A. Schardt. UML for Dummies. ISBN 0764526146. 
  5. ^ Pender, Tom. UML Bible. ISBN 0764526049. 
  6. ^ Bahrami, Ali. Object-Oriented Systems Development: Using the Unified Modeling Language. ISBN 0072349662. 
  7. ^ Pender, Tom. UML Crash Course. ISBN 0764549103. 

[edit] External links

[edit] See also