System Architect

Last updated
UNICOM System Architect
Developer(s) UNICOM Systems, a division of UNICOM Global
Stable release
System Architect 2025 -- Version 11.4.12 / Released October 21, 2024 available on UNICOM support portal: https://support.unicomsi.com/.
Operating system Microsoft Windows
Website teamblue.unicomsi.com/products/system-architect/

Unicom System Architect is an enterprise architecture tool that is used by the business and technology departments of corporations and government agencies to model their business operations and the systems, applications, and databases that support them. System Architect is used to build architectures using various frameworks including TOGAF, ArchiMate, DoDAF, MODAF, NAF and standard method notations such as sysML, UML, BPMN, and relational data modeling. System Architect is developed by UNICOM Systems, a division of UNICOM Global, a United States–based company.

Contents

Overview

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a mechanism for understanding all aspects of the organization, and planning for change. Those aspects include business transformation, business process rationalization, business or capability-driven solution development, application rationalization, transformation of IT to the cloud, server consolidation, service management and deployment, building systems of systems architectures, and so forth.

Most simply, users use EA and System Architect to build diagrammatic and textual models of any and all aspects of their organization, including the who, what, where, when, why, and how things are done so they can understand the current situation, and plan for the future. Parts of the EA can be harvested from existing sources of information in the organization—auto-discovery of network architectures, database architectures, etc. The users building the models are typically enterprise architects, business architects, business analysts, data architects, and software architects. This information can be viewed by all stakeholders of the organization — including its workers, management, and outside vendors (depending on the level of access they have been granted to the information), through generation of the information to a static website, or enabling direct web-access to the information in the repository. The stakeholders can use this information to get answers to questions about the organization's architecture in the form of visual diagrams and reports that produce textual information, pie charts, and other dashboards.

System Architect is widely used in developing defense architectures. The Architecture Development and Analysis Survey, conducted by MITRE Corporation for the US Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks & Information Integration (OASD NII) and revealed at the CISA worldwide conference on December 1, 2005, reported that out of 96 programs building DoDAF architectures responding to the survey, 77% used System Architect, either by itself (48%) or in conjunction with another modeling tool (29%). [1]

System Architect has been referenced in textbooks written in the field of enterprise architecture, UML, and data modeling, and was also used to build some or all of the models that appear in some of these books. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

History

System Architect was initially created and developed by Jan Popkin under the auspices of Popkin Software. System Architect was one of the first Windows-based computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools. It evolved through the years to become an enterprise architecture modeling tool — one that enables the end user to utilize many notations and methods to model aspects of their organization in a repository and disseminate this information to a large audience.

Telelogic acquired Popkin Software in April, 2005 [8] and IBM acquired Telelogic in 2008. After acquisition of Telelogic, IBM included System Architect (and all other Telelogic products) in the Rational division, named after Rational Software, which it acquired in 2003. [9] On January 1, 2016, IBM announced that UNICOM Global had acquired System Architect from IBM, and that its core development and support team, which originated at Popkin Software, was joining UNICOM Systems to continue to build the product line. [10]

Features

System Architect includes support for:

Technical overview

Graphic models and their underlying information are created and stored in a relational database in latest versions of Microsoft SQL Server or SQL Server Express. This database is considered a repository of information and in System Architect parlance is called an encyclopedia.

Users add information to the database via definition dialogs, or importing it from sources of record such as spreadsheets or other tools, and visualize the information on diagrammatic models. As definition information is changed, diagrams depicting the information change to reflect the underlying model information, and vice versa. This is termed in the industry as 'data centric' behavior, which forms the core tenet of Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE). Users work alone or together in teams on the network. In this multi-user environment, as one user opens a definition or diagram to edit it, other users get a read-only version of this artifact. Options exist to enable users to check out multiple definitions so that they can work on sections of the architecture without anyone else modifying it while they work on it, and administrators to freeze definitions so that they are ‘set in stone’. Users may also work in a stand-alone configuration on their laptop or workstation using SQL Server Express, which is bundled with the product.

A SQL-based query reporting language enables users to build and run reports to answer questions about the information they have modeled, such as what business processes are related to what organizational goals, what applications are used to perform what business processes, what business processes operate on what data entities, what user has modified what information on what date, and so forth.

The information captured in the repository is done so against a metamodel that acts as a template for information to capture and how it is all related. Users may choose industry-standard metamodels, such as those for TOGAF, DoDAF 2, ArchiMate, SysML, UML, etc. Users may customize this meta model, to change or add to the template of information they wish to capture and how things are interrelated.

Models are typically published to a website so that they can be viewed by a wide audience. An add-on tool called SA/Publisher is used to publish websites based on SQL-based queries of the repository using System Architect’s reporting language.

SA/XT

System Architect XT (where XT denotes eXtended Team) is a sister product to System Architect rich client, providing a pure web browser interface to read and write access to the repository. SA XT enables remote users with a web browser to:

System Architect DoDAF, UAF, MODAF, and NAF

System Architect provides support for the diagrams, matrices, and work products required to be captured for the US Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) version 2.02 (as well as features of the never-officially-released 2.03 version), the Unified Architecture Framework (UAF) version 1.2, the NATO Architecture Framework (NAF) version 4, older versions of DoDAF—DoDAF 1.5 standard and DoDAF 1.5 ABM (supporting the Activity Based Method as specified by MITRE), and the UK Ministry of Defence Architecture Framework (MODAF).

Related Research Articles

The rational unified process (RUP) is an iterative software development process framework created by the Rational Software Corporation, a division of IBM since 2003. RUP is not a single concrete prescriptive process, but rather an adaptable process framework, intended to be tailored by the development organizations and software project teams that will select the elements of the process that are appropriate for their needs. RUP is a specific implementation of the Unified Process.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zachman Framework</span> Structure for enterprise architecture

The Zachman Framework is an enterprise ontology and is a fundamental structure for enterprise architecture which provides a formal and structured way of viewing and defining an enterprise. The ontology is a two dimensional classification schema that reflects the intersection between two historical classifications. The first are primitive interrogatives: What, How, When, Who, Where, and Why. The second is derived from the philosophical concept of reification, the transformation of an abstract idea into an instantiation. The Zachman Framework reification transformations are: identification, definition, representation, specification, configuration and instantiation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Department of Defense Architecture Framework</span> Enterprise architecture framework

The Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) is an architecture framework for the United States Department of Defense (DoD) that provides visualization infrastructure for specific stakeholders concerns through viewpoints organized by various views. These views are artifacts for visualizing, understanding, and assimilating the broad scope and complexities of an architecture description through tabular, structural, behavioral, ontological, pictorial, temporal, graphical, probabilistic, or alternative conceptual means. The current release is DoDAF 2.02.

The British Ministry of Defence Architecture Framework (MODAF) was an architecture framework which defined a standardised way of conducting enterprise architecture, originally developed by the UK Ministry of Defence. It has since been replaced with the NATO Architecture Framework.

SAP PowerDesigner is a collaborative enterprise modelling tool produced by Sybase, currently owned by SAP. It can run either under Microsoft Windows as a native application or in an Eclipse environment through a plugin. It supports model-driven architecture software design, and stores models using a variety of file extensions, such as .bpm, .cdm and .pdm. The internal file structure can be either XML or a compressed binary file format. It can also store models in a database repository.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Enterprise architecture framework</span> Frame in which the architecture of a company is defined

An enterprise architecture framework defines how to create and use an enterprise architecture. An architecture framework provides principles and practices for creating and using the architecture description of a system. It structures architects' thinking by dividing the architecture description into domains, layers, or views, and offers models – typically matrices and diagrams – for documenting each view. This allows for making systemic design decisions on all the components of the system and making long-term decisions around new design requirements, sustainability, and support.

Model-driven engineering (MDE) is a software development methodology that focuses on creating and exploiting domain models, which are conceptual models of all the topics related to a specific problem. Hence, it highlights and aims at abstract representations of the knowledge and activities that govern a particular application domain, rather than the computing concepts.

The Unified Profile for DoDAF/MODAF (UPDM) is the product of an Object Management Group (OMG) initiative to develop a modeling standard that supports both the USA Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) and the UK Ministry of Defence Architecture Framework (MODAF). The current UPDM - the Unified Profile for DoDAF and MODAF was based on earlier work with the same acronym and a slightly different name - the UML Profile for DoDAF and MODAF.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MagicDraw</span> Systems modelling software

MagicDraw is a proprietary visual UML, SysML, BPMN, and UPDM modeling tool with team collaboration support.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Unified process</span> Object oriented software development process framework

The unified software development process or unified process is an iterative and incremental software development process framework. The best-known and extensively documented refinement of the unified process is the rational unified process (RUP). Other examples are OpenUP and agile unified process.

Telelogic AB was a software business headquartered in Malmö, Sweden. Telelogic was founded in 1983 as a research and development arm of Televerket, the Swedish department of telecom. It was later acquired by IBM Rational, and exists under the IBM software group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oracle Designer</span>

Oracle Designer was Oracle's CASE tool for designing an information system and generating it. After generating the information system one is able to edit the generated code with Oracle Developer Suite.

Rational Rose was a development environment for Unified Modeling Language. It integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and Rational Application Developer. The Rational Software division of IBM, which previously produced Rational Rose, wrote this software.

Rational Rhapsody, a modeling environment based on UML, is a visual development environment for systems engineers and software developers creating real-time or embedded systems and software. Rational Rhapsody uses graphical models to generate software applications in various languages including C, C++, Ada, Java and C#.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rational Software Modeler</span> Unified Modeling Language design tool

Rational Software Modeler (RSM), made by IBM's Rational Software division, is a Unified Modeling Language (UML) 2.0-based visual modeling and design tool. Rational Software Modeler is based on the Eclipse open-source software framework and is used for visual modeling and model-driven development (MDD) with UML for creating applications and web services. IBM ceased marketing Rational Software Modeler in 2010 and ended support for it in 2015. Much of the same functionality is now available through Rational Software Architect.

Enterprise engineering is the body of knowledge, principles, and practices used to design all or part of an enterprise. An enterprise is a complex socio-technical system that comprises people, information, and technology that interact with each other and their environment in support of a common mission. One definition is: "an enterprise life-cycle oriented discipline for the identification, design, and implementation of enterprises and their continuous evolution", supported by enterprise modelling. The discipline examines each aspect of the enterprise, including business processes, information flows, material flows, and organizational structure. Enterprise engineering may focus on the design of the enterprise as a whole, or on the design and integration of certain business components.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Enterprise life cycle</span> Process of changing an enterprise over time

Enterprise life cycle (ELC) in enterprise architecture is the dynamic, iterative process of changing the enterprise over time by incorporating new business processes, new technology, and new capabilities, as well as maintenance, disposition and disposal of existing elements of the enterprise.

UNICOM Focal Point is a portfolio management and decision analysis tool used by the product organizations of corporations and government agencies to collect information and feedback from internal and external stakeholders on the value of applications, products, systems, technologies, capabilities, ideas, and other organizational artifacts—prioritize on which ones will provide the most value to the business, and manage the roadmap of how artifacts will be fielded, improved, or removed from the market or organization. UNICOM Focal Point is also used to manage a portfolio of projects, to understand resources used on those projects, and timelines for completion. The product is also used for pure product management—where product managers use it to gather and analyze enhancement requests from customers to decide on what features to put in a product, and develop roadmaps for future product versions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Enterprise Architect (software)</span> Visual modeling and design tool

Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is a visual modeling and design tool based on the OMG UML. The platform supports: the design and construction of software systems; modeling business processes; and modeling industry based domains. It is used by businesses and organizations to not only model the architecture of their systems, but to process the implementation of these models across the full application development life-cycle.

References

  1. ↑ The US Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (NII) Architecture Development and Analysis Survey, conducted by MITRE Corporation, and presented at the CISA worldwide conference on December 1, 2005.
  2. ↑ Goikoetxea, Ambrose (2007). Enterprise Architectures: Planning, Design, and Assessment. ISBN   978-981-270-027-8.
  3. ↑ Whitten, Jeffrey L.; Lonnie D. Bentley; Kevin C. Dittman (1998). Systems Analysis and Design Methods . Irwin/McGraw-Hill. ISBN   0-256-19906-X.
  4. ↑ Chonoles, Michael Jesse; James A. Schardt (2003). UML for Dummies . ISBN   0-7645-2614-6.
  5. ↑ Pender, Tom (26 September 2003). UML Bible. ISBN   0-7645-2604-9.
  6. ↑ Bahrami, Ali. Object-Oriented Systems Development: Using the Unified Modeling Language. ISBN   0-07-234966-2.
  7. ↑ Pender, Tom (November 2002). UML Crash Course. ISBN   0-7645-4910-3.
  8. ↑ "Telelogic acquires Popkin". Government Computer News.
  9. ↑ "IBM Completed Acquisition of Rational Software in 2003". IBM website. Archived from the original on May 16, 2006.
  10. ↑ "UNICOM® Global Acquires IBM® Rational® System Architect from IBM Corp". UNICOM Systems website.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.