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I have a confession; I’m fairly new using modeling tools but have quite an experience in capturing business processes and implementing them in IT organizations.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on what Enterprise Architecture is, how it’s done and what are the challenges but just now I’ve started to actually play around with it using a  tool and I’d like to share my first impression and what I’ve learnt on IBM System Architect

The biggest thing I’ve come to realize is that System Architect is a tool. Just a tool. This means that without the proper data and information it’s probably not worth much. There are a lot of processes and information that this tool can capture and help organize but without collecting and capturing the data, without understanding what the business processes are, without defining a common language in the organization, System Architect will probably not be worth much to you. There is a lot of work that needs to be done before you even start looking at a tool; work to define and collect the different components, systems, applications and information from your project.

In IBM System Architect you have three main entities: Diagrams, Definitions and Symbols. There can be different types of diagrams and a diagram can consist of different types of symbols. The symbols are a representation of the definitions. First you need to indicate what the definitions of the entity you would like to capture(i.e. Activity, System, Function, Task etc). Next you will place graphical Symbols in different diagrams. All Symbols which represent the same entity are therefore linked to the same Definition.

You can define attributes or what is called in System Architect properties for each Definition. In unique cases you can also add specific properties to the symbol itself. A change in the properties of a definition, of course applies to all the Symbols linked to it.

For example, System Architecture’s Tutorial uses as an example a Hotel chain. In this example, there is a business process diagram for Reservation Cancellation that includes a Transaction called “Release Room”. There is a definition of releasing a room which represents the steps required to make the room available again. In case there is a different business process which needs to use the Transaction “Release Room”, you can drag & drop the already existing definition onto the screen and a Symbol linked to the same definition will be created. This is really good reuse since now you can make a change centrally to the definition and all its occurrences in different Business process diagrams are automatically updated.

Another thing I noticed in System Architect that can be a big advantage is the ability to customize the properties. An organization can define what properties are relevant for its Definitions in addition to the definition’s properties. This can be changed and updated to fit the organizations needs.

I feel as though I’ve started uncovering only the tip of the iceberg but what I’ve seen so far I liked. This is a very powerful tool that can be very helpful and improve the ability of an organization to see the complete picture and allow it to make more educated decisions. But like I mentioned at the beginning, the hard part is not to use the tool but how to use the tool. How do you collect the data? What are the definitions and how do you make sure that everyone is using the same definitions? Thus my next step is to study the one of the Frameworks which  are commonly used in the market.

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