Stovepipe Enterprise

Symptoms and Consequences

• incompatible terminology, approaches, and technology between enterprise systems.
• brittle, monolithic, and undocumented architectures.
• inability to extend systems to support business needs.
• incorrect use of technology standard.
• lack of software reuse between enterprise systems.
• lack of interpolation between enterprise systems.
• inability of system to inter-operate even when using the same standards.
• excessive maintenance costs due to changing business requirements; the need to extend the system to incorporate new products and technologies.
• employee turnover introduces knowledge debt.

Causes

• Lack of enterprise technology strategy, specifically:
  • Lack of a standard reference model
  • Lack of system profiles
• Lack of incentive for cooperation across system developments
• Lack of communications between system development projects
• Lack of knowledge of the technology standard being used
• Absent of horizontal interfaces in system integration solutions.
• Change of management (e.g. merger)

Exception

• vendor locked-in services like Oracle database.

• Arrange the requirement models to have:
  • 1 open system reference model per enterprise
    • open system reference model contains high-level architecture diagram and a list of target standards for system development projects.
    • purpose is to identify all of the candidate standards for projects, to coordinate open-system strategies (e.g. POSIX standards)
  • 1 technological profile per enterprise
  • 1 operational environment per enterprise
  • 1 system requirements profile per system family

• Arrange the specification models to have:
  • 1 per enterprise, family, and system
  • 1 computational facility architecture per system family
  • 1 per key point of interoperability
  • 1 development profile per system family