Following on from my blog about LADP I am going to go through each stage of the architectural design process with a real life scenario. This article covers stage 1, the business level overview and requirements.


So for this particular example engagement the IT manager acted as the business representative as the system had been in place for 15 years and was the critical business system for the Company. The system itself was a contract price, bid, manage and billing system. The IT manager drew the main business blocks:


·        Contract Bidding system

·        Contract Management system

·        Pricing system

·        Billing and invoicing system


The business flow was: A business request went into the contract bidding system where a bid was generated by pulling together all the different elements of the bid and using the pricing subsystem to generate a final bid. If the bid was accepted it went into the contract management system and then requests against the contract were validated, priced and billed by the billing system using the contract in the contract management system and the pricing information from the pricing system.


The problems with the system was that it was one monolithic application and so very difficult to change. Specifically the system could not support the euro and looking forward, the new ERP system that was to be installed. Additionally the maintenance costs of the mainframe were seen to be a significant business issue. These two elements meant that the system needed to be upgraded and moved to a less costly platform.


The operational business requirements were to have a modular, low risk upgrade strategy with minimal system downtime and a final 23X5 availability system with 50 concurrent / 200 maximum users and performance of 95% of response in less than 2 seconds.


So that was a quick overview of the business side of things, next the Present implementation and constraint analysis.