What EA needs for large organizations?

[bcrier]

We have been an EA user for almost a year and half and I have many great things to say about it.  But, one area where EA fails is that it still looks at the Architecture world one project at a time.

I can create individual projects in EA but cannot share elements between projects.  We want to document our organization in Enterprise models and document our projects in models that share elements with the Enterprise project.  Basically we want to have one project called enterprise.eap, which contains our enterprise actors, activities, hardware systems and the rest.  And let’s say a Claims Processing project that uses elements from enterprise.eap project.  We want to centralize changes as much as possible to enterprise elements, and have them reflected in all projects using those elements.  This allows us to do much better impact analysis.

Unfortunately the only way to handle this in EA today is by keeping the projects in one big project.  Even disregarding the performance and security issues, there is a major usability issue.  My project team working on Claims Processing Project has to navigate through the huge model in EA which contains about 45 projects.  It is becoming unusable.

This requirement has been expressed and asked for many times in these forums.  Is there any possibility that EA Engineers and Developers would consider including this?

Thank you for great work and patience listening to all the requests.  I do strongly believe that for EA to be taken seriously in corporate world it needs to grow in this specific area.

Hope to see some solution to this very annoying issue soon.  In our organization, some people are reaching the end of their faith in EA because of this one.

Regards,
Bobby

[Dave_Bullet]

My advice:

1. Ditch EAP files.  You need to use a database
2. Create 2 top level root models (in the same DB) - one called "Enterprise Architecture" the other "Projects"
3. When a project adds new artefacts and is signed off - move the artefacts you want to re-use (signficant ones) back into the Enterprise Architecture model.

You should adopt Zachman or another framework to give a project indepedent structure to your models - (ie. for TOGAF an application, data, business, infrastructure architecture views)

In any case (and I think this applies to all modeling tools), you need to have a process for moving in artifacts added for a project back into the enterprise model.  This is something you could automate if you use stereotypes or some way of "flagging" the components you want to move back (ie. use EA automation or SQL directly on the database).

If you have a geographically dispersed site - either use Citrix for the EA client or replicate the database between sites for performance.  If you have remote users - get them a network connection to always connect to the central database (it will be cheaper than people's time synching remote models, occasional stuff ups and frustrations - trust me).

Can you say how other tools achieve this better?  Suggesting to Sparx might be useful here.

Cheers,
David.

[Justin Halls]

If the performance issues can be addressed then the usability issue may not be that painful. If you need things integrated then you will end up with one large logical model regardless of how you do it.

It is not news that a fat client architecture does not scale. If Sparx wants to seriously crack the enterprise market it will have to move to a multi-tiered architecture. This has HUGE implications and will require a near rewrite of EA, but it has to be done.

In the mean time, rather than loading the complete project at startup, much can be done on an event-driven as-needed basis. Varying Hierarchy View Depth does not seem have an influence on performance. The software should assume the responsibility of providing a user only the data that she needs (or indirectly require) rather than requiring the user to segment the model purely for performance reasons. Changing the performance model to provide many small delays rather than one big delay may be slightly annoying but will definitely scale much better.

Our enterprise model takes upwards of 5 minutes to load and performance in general can be poor at times (I am assuming that you are prepared to accept that the size of the model is the issue and that external Network and Database performance issues have been addressed).

By the way, my name is Chris Kriel. I don't know why the forum software thinks I am Javier Guerra Diez.

[Paolo F Cantoni]

By the way, my name is Chris Kriel. I don't know why the forum software thinks I am Javier Guerra Diez.

Javier Guerra Diez is a busy boy... He's also taken over pdecker (ask for Javier's last 10 post!s)

I never fail to get a laugh out of the many ways the Sparxians seem to manipulate the user interfaces (whether it's EA or this board)

Anyhow - maybe it's time for a board upgrade and clean-out?

Paolo

[Dave_Bullet]

Chris - have you tried to clear your cookies and re-login?

Sparx need to address model scalability - my 6,000 object SQL Server database model is getting slower.  ie. adding new elements to a diagram can take 1 - 2 seconds.  This may not sound much - but if you are doing that operation hundreds of times per day, it can add up (I am very productive you know!

David.