Developing an Operations View

Stakeholders and Concerns      Modeling the View      Key Issues

Stakeholders and Concerns

This view should be developed for the operations, administration and management personnel of the system.

Major concerns for these stakeholders are understanding how the system is managed as a whole, and how all components of the system are managed. The key concern is managing change in the system and predicting necessary preventative maintenance.

In general these stakeholders are concerned with assuring that the availability of the system does not suffer when changes occur. Managing the system includes managing components such as:

• security components

• data assets

• software assets

• hardware assets

• networking assets

Modeling the View

The general architecture of a "managed system" can be modeled with ADML entities (components, ports, connectors and roles).

Additionally business scenarios are an extremely useful way to depict what should happen when planned and unplanned events occur. It is highly recommended that business scenarios be created for planned change, and for unplanned change.

The model of actors and interactions in the business scenario should be developed using the above constructs, components, ports, roles, connectors.

The following paragraphs describe some of the key issues that the architect might consider when constructing business scenarios.

Key Issues

The Operations View acts as a check and balance on the difficulties and day-to-day running costs of systems built within the new architecture. Often, system management is not considered until after all the important purchasing and development decisions have been taken, and taking a separate management view at an early stage in architecture development is one way to avoid this pitfall. It is good practice to develop the Technical Operations View with close consideration of the Technical Development View, since in general management is difficult to retrofit into an existing design.

Key elements of the Operations View are:

• the policies, procedures and guidelines drive your management requirements. (such as a policy to restrict downloading software from the internet)

• how your shop measure system availability.

• the management services and utilities required.

• the likely quantity, quality and location of management and support personnel.

• the ability of users to take on system management tasks, such as password maintenance.

• the manageability of existing and planned components in each of the component categories.

• whether management should be centralized or distributed.

• whether security is the responsibility of system managers or a separate group, bearing in mind any legal requirements.

Key technical components categories that are the subject of the Operations View deal with change, either planned upgrades, or unplanned outages. The following table lists specific concerns in for each component category.

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