Technology Standards & Reference Model

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Jason MacKenzie
Posts: 6
Joined: 12 Jun 2012, 18:40

First of all I'd like to say thank you for the incredible work you have done. It is truly appreciated.

My question is related to the Technology Reference Model view - which elements/attributes in the meta-model drive this report. I'm working my way through a fictional enterprise to familiarize myself with your meta-model however this report is always coming up with the "outline" but no technology components on it. I realize this may be a very silly question :)

Secondly - how exactly is something defined as a technology standard in the model against which you can measure compliance or strategic technology alignment.

Thank you so much!

Jason MacKenzie
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jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

Hi Jason,

Thanks very much - it's great to get feedback on the Essential Project tools!

There are no silly questions in here, so please feel free to ask about anything that is not clear.

I think you might find the View Manual for this View helpful as it includes details of which aspects of the model the View is using.

Technology Reference and Standards Model View Manual

However, I think this particular help page could do with some more details that are alluded to but not explained clearly. Apologies for that but it provides a good starting point for what this View requires.

Firstly, the relationship between the Technology Product (sub-class of Technology Provider) is not direct to the Technology Components. Rather, there is a relationship class, Technology Product Role, that we use to describe which components a particular product can be used for - more on this shortly, when I address your last question.

So, we've captured the Capabilities, the Components and the Products and related the Products to the Components via the Technology Product Roles. The forms in Protege will guide to creating those Technology Product Roles as you model - so you don't need to define them all before you start relating the Technology Products to the Technology Components.

On the View Manual, it mentions that the Technology Capability requires that the Classified As slot is completed. Apologies there doesn't appear to be further details as to what it should be classified as! It is these classifications that control where the capabilities (and therefore the related components) are rendered on the reference model.

What you need to do (and this is what the View Manual should say) is Classify each of your relevant Technology Capabilities, using the terms defined in the 'Technology Capability Layers' taxonomy.

How do you choose which term to apply to classify which capability?
We have seen a large number of technology reference models and they all tend to take this sort of layered shape with things running up the sides as well. However, not everyone draws this in the same way - and we recognise that we need to provide flexibility as to how the capabilities (and therefore components) are laid out on this kind of diagram. The neat solution we came up with was to use these taxonomy terms to classify each capability and use that taxonomy to control how the capabilities are added to the elements of the diagram. This particular taxonomy is used purely to control these user-defined decisions about which layer of the reference model each capability fits into.

Three of these taxonomy terms have suggestive names - Configuration Capability Technology Layer, Monitoring Capability Technology Layer and Platform Capability Technology layer. Anything classified by these terms will appear in the left-hand vertical box, right-hand vertical box and bottom box, respectively.

The other terms (Technology Capability Layer 1 - 5 plus Other) are used to display things in the middle set of layered boxes from top to bottom - but you don't need to use all of them.

All that's required is that you go through the Technology Capabilities and classify each to the appropriate Technology Capability Layers Taxonomy Term to meet your view of the Technology Reference Model.

Hopefully, this should get you started with this and gets your components displayed in the reference model.

On your second question, we define the standards by using the Technology Product Roles, which relate a Technology Product to a Technology Component to describe the components for which a product can be used. For example, Oracle 11g can be used to provide a relational database management system, so we can define a Technology Product Role "Oracle 11g as RDBMS". Similarly, Oracle 11g has a Java Application Server, so we can create another Technology Product Role "Oracle 11g as J2EE Application Server". Note that as we define these relationships, the forms automatically manage the fully-qualified name of the Technology Product Roles, which helps a lot as a labour saving and consistency device.

Each Technology Product Role has an attribute called Strategic Lifecycle Status. We can use the Lifecycle Status to describe our strategic standards for when this product should be used as that component. The Lifecycle Status values are a user-extensible vocabulary of terms, so if you need more values, that's not a problem.
If something is our strategic, production standard for e.g. our database, then we would use the "Production" Lifecycle Status. If it's being trialled to be used in this way in special circumstances, we could use the "Pilot" status.

This enables us to manage the fact that in my example, Oracle 11g is our production RDBMS but is off-strategy in terms of it being used as a J2EE Application Server.

Finally, as part of Essential Meta Model 3, we extended the Strategic Lifecycle Status slot on the Technology Provider Role to enable it to hold multiple Lifecycle Status values. This might seem counter-intuitive but it enables us to do things like apply organisational scope to each standard. So, for a certain division, Oracle is the standard RDBMS but this is pilot in another division.

It is these Technology Product Roles that are queried in the Technology Platform Alignment view to provide a standards compliance review of the technology platform that is supporting an Application.

This idea of the Providers playing roles has also been incorporated in the Application logical layer, to describe how Application Providers (our real systems) are being used (playing roles of Application Services), e.g. "Siebel as a CRM System". Using this pattern consistently is powerful and enables us to understand where we have things (Technology Products, Application Providers) being used for things that we might not want them to be.

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
Jason MacKenzie
Posts: 6
Joined: 12 Jun 2012, 18:40

Thank you very much for the detailed response Jonathan. That was very helpful.

Off modelling I go!

Jason
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