Dennis Smith

1
On the Role of Net-Centric Computing in
Enterprise Integration Architectures

• Dennis Smith
• Software Engineering Institute
• Carnegie Mellon University
• Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• Scott Tilley
• Department of Computer Science
• University of California, Riverside
• Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense
• August, 2001

2
Enterprise Integration

• Enterprise integration has the goal of providing
  timely and accurate exchange of consistent
  information between business functions to support
  strategic and tactical business goals in a manner
  that appears to be seamless.
• Integration of information systems represents a
  significant and unsolved problem
• 20 to 40 of labor costs trace to storage and
  reconciliation of data
• 70 of software code in corporate software
  systems are dedicated to moving data from system
  to system
• Clinger-Cohen Act mandates that each federal
  agency develop a plan for enterprise integration
  (VA, IRS, DoD OSD have all instituted efforts)
• US and international corporations have ongoing
  major integration efforts (KLM, EURO, Australian
  stock exchange)
• Effective integration is a prerequisite for
  e-business success (Dell vs Compaq and IBM)

3
Relationship of Enterprise Integration to Product
Lines

• Product lines generate multiple products from a
  common set of assets.
• Enterprise integration attempts to make multiple
  products appear as one.
• Some basic product line concepts provide a
  starting point for the problem of enterprise
  integration
• Technology, especially architecture
• Technical management
• Organizational management

4
Starting Point Software Product Lines
Market strategy/ Application domain
pertain to
is satisfied by
share an
Architecture
Products
used to structure
CORE ASSETS
are built from
Components

• Product lines
• take economic advantage of commonality
• bound variability

5
What Is Product Line Practice?

• Product line practice is the systematic use of
  software assets to modify, assemble, instantiate,
  or generate the multiple products that constitute
  a product line.
• Product line practice involves strategic, large-
  grained reuse as a business enabler.

6
Examples of Product Line Practice

• CelsiusTech - on board ship systems
• hardware-to-software cost ratio changed from
  3565 to 8020
• Motorola - FLEXworks Project (family of one-way
  pagers)
• 4x cycle time improvement
• 80 reuse
• Hewlett Packard
• 2-7x cycle time improvement (some 10x)
• Sample Project
• shipped 5x number of products
• that were 4x as complex
• and had 3x the number of features
• with 4x products shipped/person
• Cummins Engine Co.
• system build and integration went from roughly 1
  year to 3 days
• 4.5 years in product line development
• over 20 products successfully launched

7
Progress and Challenges

• Progress
• Awareness of potential
• Convincing examples of success
• Widespread research interest in enabling
  technologies architectures legacy system
  reengineering web
• Standardization of commercial middleware.
• Growing popularity of the notion of "rapid
  development.
• Community acceptance of well-defined processes
  for software development.
• Challenges
• Lack of widespread understanding of software
  architecture
• No standard way to represent architectures.
• No codified architecture and product line
  migration strategies for vast number of legacy
  systems.
• Lack of repeatable, integrated technical and
  management product line practices.

8
Current SEI Products to Support Product Lines
-1

• Product Line Framework - identifies the
  foundational concepts underlying the software
  product lines and the essential issues to
  consider before fielding a product line
• Product Line Probe - examines an organizations
  readiness to adopt or ability to succeed with a
  software product line approach
• Options Analysis for Reengineering (OAR) -
  provides a systematic approach to making
  decisions on the mining of components from legacy
  systems
• MAP - provides an architectural analysis of
  multiple systems in a similar domain and
  evaluates these systems to determine the
  technical potential to move to a common product
  line architecture

9
Current SEI Products to Support Product Lines -2

• Architecture Reconstruction - reasons about the
  architectures of existing systems for reuse,
  support of product line development, and for
  analysis.
• ATAM - performs an architecture evaluation that
  focuses on multiple quality attributes,
  illuminates points in the architecture where
  quality attribute tradeoffs occur, and generates
  a context for ongoing quantitative analysis

10
Enterprise Architecture Planning

• Zachman architectures
• Data
• Functions
• Technology
• Architectures produce logical clusterings of
  data and business processes into potential
  applications
• The process provides a high level integration
  blueprint
• Confusion these architectures provide a
  starting point for understanding the problem
  domain, but do not provide the foundation for
  software development

11
Potential Role of Markup Languages

• Markup languages (such as XML) provide the
  capability to integrate the structured data from
  databases and legacy systems with the
  unstructured data of text documents, graphics and
  images.
• These capabilities can
• facilitate the integration of legacy systems
• provide for the integration of ebusiness and B2B
  applications.

12
Net Centric Computing

• (NCC) is a distributed environment where
  applications and data are downloaded from servers
  and exchanged with peers across a network on as
  as-needed basis
• Internet and intranet technologies have the
  potential to assist with the problem of
  enterprise integration
• Web portals can access corporate data to
• search and retrieve inquiries
• access information about orders, order
  fulfillment and customer data.

13
Other Relevant Technologies

• Control integration
• Explosion of middleware technologies enable
  viable control integration approaches
• CSIRO has integrated multiple sets of information
  systems for Australian stock exchange
• ERP COTS solutions (SAP, ORACLE, PeopleSoft)
• Ought to provide common solutions
• Require massive customization
• Difficult to integrate with other products
• Customization can produce a dead end COTS product

14
Disciplined Migration Planning

• Many efforts assume a big bang approach
• Migration planning issues include
• Identifying all relevant stakeholders and involve
  them throughout the project
• Ensuring a common understanding of the problem
          
• Determining that the initiative is commensurate
  with the maturity of the organizations software
  practices
• Defining all aspects of the software architecture
  and its constraints on existing and new systems
• Performing a thorough analysis of legacy systems,
  their interfaces, and changes required
• Breaking the problem into bite size chunks that
  are phased in incrementally
• Performing a pilot before committing to a large
  scale plan

15
SEI IRAD on Enterprise Integration

• Develop a roadmap
• characterize the state of the practice,
• identify critical issues
• determine if there are trends that promise
  significant breakthroughs
• determine if the SEI can serve as a catalyst in
  maturing solutions and transitioning them
• Potential workshop in conjunction with CASCON
  this November in Toronto, Canada
• we welcome collaboration, input and comments