Here’s a question for the EA community. As part of understanding a broad set of solution options to meet specific business goals and objectives, I often want to model ‘what if’ scenarios, i.e. what the various architecture domains would look like if we proceeded with Option A, or B etc. This is part of the ‘Solutions and Opportunities’ phase E of TOGAF 8.1.1 [OK - maybe I should be talking about TOGAF v9 by now 
- see here ]
I want to be able to model these so I can clearly articulate to my customer what the world (in TOGAF architectural domain terms) will look like if we select each option. For example, “what would my enterprise look like in 2010′.
But EA modelling tools don’t seem to support this very well. I don’t want my various different options to ‘bleed’ into each other in the model, e.g. if I capture a relationship between components 1 and 2 in solution option A, that relationship may not exist at all in solution option B. The only way I’ve found round this in the past is to duplicate parts of my model to keep them separate (in different packages etc) – which is a bit ugly. Maybe in TeleLogic System Architect you can get round this by some clever customisation of the meta-model…
Anyone else had this problem? Even better – a solution?
February 10, 2009 at 1:20 am
Hypothetical Business Models…
What Robin highlights here is that the standard modelling tools and notations aren’t always very helpful at supporting choice, especially when the choices get at all complex. Often it seems that the tools only really work for documenting the architect…
February 12, 2009 at 9:02 am
I’d now like to introduce an even more complex problem to crack (but along the same lines). Commonly we work in teams that are working on solution architectures for multiple projects at a time – and so each designer is potentially modelling a number of solution options, and worse still, each project may get canned/reshaped if the cost-benefit case does not stack up. The designers may (indeed should) attempt to identify commonality and therefore reuse of components/services across their various solutions. So tracking dependencies across these projects is vital and ideally our enterprise model should help us to do this.
For me – this is all in the ‘hard pile’ and there is no substitute for good communications between designers and good old dependency management. If you’ve got some modelling ideas around this I’d be very interested to hear them…