The Concept of Total Architecture^SM

Changing something you don’t understand is risky. For an enterprise, what needs to be understood is how the business processes, people, information, and systems collaborate to perform the work of the enterprise. This is the Total Architecture of the enterprise.

The interactions between people, business processes, information, and systems have become so complex that it is not possible to alter one without impacting the others. The changes have to be coordinated.

Total Architecture uses the techniques of model-based system engineering (MBSE) to capture an understanding of this collaboration. This model provides the basis for determining the scope of proposed changes and evaluating various design alternatives.

This Executive Overview provides a brief, high-level overview of Total Architecture.

Rationale

It is risky to try and change something you do not understand, and the reality is that nobody understands how your enterprise works. Your business is a complex system of information systems and organizations that was never designed – it is an accident of history. The big picture of how your enterprise works it not documented, and what documentation you may have is highly fragmented and incomplete.

The risks of attempting modernization and transformation projects are well known, ranging from massive cost and schedule overruns to outright failure. But these risks can be mitigated. Analysis of multiple large-scale projects reveals that those that invested in understanding the big picture of how it will work reduced development costs by 50% and overall project duration by 25%.

Total Architecture provides this big-picture understanding for your enterprise.

What Is Total Architecture?

Total Architecture provides a holistic model of how your enterprise works, encompassing its people, business processes, systems, and information. The model captures and exposes the relationships and dependencies between these elements. It captures their behavior and structure along with their governing requirements.

While Total Architecture is comprehensive in scope, the model is modest in the level of detail represented. The focus is on understanding the big-picture concepts and relationships. Equally important is making this knowledge accessible to all stakeholders – executives, business managers, knowledge workers, and technologists – in terms that they can readily understand.

The Total Architecture model initially provides a deep understanding of your enterprise as it works today. This provides a framework for identifying the appropriate scope of a modernization effort and efficiently evaluating what-if scenarios for various modernization approaches.

The Elements of Total Architecture

Total architecture uses the techniques of Model-Based System Engineering (MBSE), the best-practice approach used to architect complex technological systems such as automobiles, aircraft, computers, military systems, and spacecraft. MBSE uses the industry-standard Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Systems Modeling Language (SysML).

Total architecture uses these MBSE techniques to capture a comprehensive understanding of your enterprise’s organization, business processes, information, and systems.

To promote effective communications, the model is organized in four levels of abstraction, each with a different intended audience.

The model also captures the relationships between abstraction levels. For instance, the business may perceive a business system to be a single entity, while at the technical level it actually comprises a set of servers and a database. These abstraction relationships enable drilling down into the model to obtain additional levels of detail as required.

The History of Total Architecture

Total Architecture has been in active field use for more than 25 years. It began with the realization that it takes many systems to run an enterprise, and that these systems do not live in isolation: they interact with one another and with the people in the enterprise. The business processes are a collaboration between people and systems. The enterprise itself is a complex system of systems and people, known in technical terms as a distributed system.

Evolution

Over the years, field experience has led to a subtle shift in emphasis. Early work covered all aspects of distributed systems, including fault tolerance, high availability, scalability, and security. In practice, it became apparent that the most expensive design errors were in the high-level structure and organization of the business processes and systems. It was found that an examination of the proposed behavior, i.e. the collaboration between people and systems, exposed these design flaws early in the game, allowing the flaws to be corrected before any significant investment had been made.

Another emerging realization was that it is important to model at different levels of abstraction and present targeted views of the model to different stakeholders, from C-level down to knowledge workers and coders, in terms they can readily understand.

Courses and Certification

Several professional courses were developed based on Total Architecture. These courses, each corresponding to one of the TIBCO books below, used the Total Architecture approach to explore the architectural concepts related to the topic and then explain the role that specific TIBCO products could play in a distributed systems architecture.

A certification program was also developed for TIBCO Architecture Fundamentals. This week-long hands-on exercise provided the candidate with the opportunity to demonstrate both architectural skills and product-specific knowledge. A panel of subject-matter experts graded each exercise and determined the candidate’s qualification for certification.

Publications

The earliest books on Total Architecture focused on a particular type of distributed system architecture known as a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Despite the use of the SOA terminology, the focus of the books is the Total Architecture of the enterprise.

The first two books are technology agnostic and cover the principles of Total Architecture from both a business and technical perspective. The remaining three books use Total Architecture to explain the usage of specific TIBCO technologies. Each first explores its topic from the Total Architecture perspective and then dives into the specifics of employing the relevant TIBCO products.