by Peter Mollins
It’s not easy to be an IT architect. Architects are under constant pressure to create and enforce efficient IT models for delivering business services. This is difficult enough thanks to shifting corporate strategies and business requirements, but it is made still more challenging by the reality of today’s IT portfolios. In particular, the complex application portfolios that automate core business operations.
Operations are run by highly-customized applications built in dozens of languages and modified over the course of decades. These applications are often poorly understood, without up-to-date documentation, and out of alignment with architectural standards. Yet the vast majority of new business requirements impact, extend, and reuse these complex existing application portfolios.
As a result, architects should be especially conscious of how to control and improve the architecture of their current application portfolios. To do so requires that architects have insight into these systems. This is no simple task when applications have grown to millions of lines of code developed in everything from COBOL and Assembler to VB and Java -- and combinations of these and other languages.
An effective strategy to understand the architectural reality of the application portfolio is via metadata-based abstraction. That is, by “tagging” and grouping application artifacts and their interrelationships (e.g., data flow) we can harvest the “as-is” architectural model of the application portfolio. When equipped with this intelligence, architects can improve control over their complex applications.
Architects can begin with a ‘top-down’ approach by identifying portions of the application portfolio that should be targeted first. Application portfolio management (APM) tools can facilitate this process to narrow the scope of analysis. Once identified, architects can then proceed to identify processes within the prioritized applications. This process is greatly facilitated by generating a basic understanding of the targeted applications via static analysis
Source:
http://esj.com/articles/2010/02/23/architecting-for-reality.aspx