Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Andr Vasconcelos
CEO - Centro de Engenharia Organizacional, INESC, Lisboa, Portugal
Email: andre.vasconcelos@ceo.inesc.pt
Keywords: Information System Architecture (ISA), ISA Evaluation, Business/System Alignment, Enterprise
Information System, CEO Framework.
Abstract: Currently organizations, pushed by several business and technological changes, are more concern about
Information systems (IS) than ever. Though organizations usually still face each IS as a separately
technological issue with slight relations with business domain. This paper discusses the importance of the
Information System Architecture (ISA) as the tool for ensuring a global view on IS and for explicitly
assessing alignment between technology and business processes and strategies. In this paper, considering
the numerous topics, technologies and buzzwords surrounding ISA domain, we identify the major ISA open
issues, namely: ISA Modelling, ISA Methodology, ISA Evaluation, IS Architectural Styles and Patterns,
and IS/Business Alignment. We also present our advances in addressing some of these issues, by proposing
an approach for ISA evaluation and IS/Business Alignment measure. This approach is supported on an ISA
modelling framework and provides several indicators and measures for ISA evaluation. This approach is
applied to an IS health care project evaluation.
p ro c e s s
In f o r m a t io n E n t ity IS B l o c k
o p e r a tio n
o p e ra tio n
evaluation.
e x is ts
IT B lo c k I T S e r v ic e
IT S e r v ic e
In next section we describe our approach to Figure 2. CEO UML Meta-model Extensions for ISA
some of these research topics. (Vasconcelos et. al., 2003)
The core concepts in the CEO framework profile
are:
4 OUR APPROACH Business Process a collection of activities that
produces value to a customer;
In this section we describe how we are Information Entity any person, place, physical thing
addressing some of the open issues described in or concept that is relevant in the business context and
section 3, specifically ISA Modelling (3.1), ISA about which is possible and relevant (for the
evaluation (3.3), and IS/Business align assessment organization) to keep information;
(3.5).
IS Block a collection of mechanisms and operations
organized in order to manipulate data;
4.1 ISA Modelling IT Block infrastructure, application platform and
technological/software component that realizes (or
In order to model the enterprise the implements) an (or several) IS Block(s).
Organizational Engineering Center (or CEO, for These blocks can be further specialized; for
short, in Portuguese) proposed the CEO framework instance at technological level CEO defines IT
(Vasconcelos et. al. 2001) for modelling enterprises Infrastructure Block (representing the physical and
using a restricted set of business objects. The CEO infra-structural concepts), IT Platform Block
framework was defined as an UML profile (UML (representing the collection of services needed for
1997). implementing and IT deploying applications), and IT
Although the CEO framework could not be used Application Block (representing the technological
to define a complete ISA, it presented some implementation of an IS Block). Please see
interesting extensions to represent dependencies (Vasconcelos et. al., 2003) for further detail.
between businesses and systems. The business
objects defined in the framework are goals for
strategy modelling; processes for business process 4.2 IS/Business Alignment Assessment
modelling, resources for business resource
modelling, and blocks for IS modelling. The CEO The IS/Business Alignment Assessment is based
framework also ensures consistency, easy of use and on three dimensions deriving from the Enterprise
provides mechanisms to maintain integrity with the Architectures components: Business Architecture,
ultimate goal of reducing the impedance mismatch Information Architecture and Application
between business and IT architectures. Architecture.
Recently, CEO framework founding concepts at In this approach, understanding the relationships
Information System level where investigated and an that exist among the architectural components and
UML profile for ISA modelling at informational, the possibility of measuring the alignment as the
application and technological levels was proposed result of three possible misalignments, is the key that
(Vasconcelos et. al., 2003). Figure 2 presents the enables us to evaluate the IS/Business Alignment as
current core concepts of the CEO framework (at ISA the misalignment:
level). between Business Process (BP) (part of
Business Architecture) and Information
(part of Information Architecture);
between BP (part of Business Architecture) ntP, number of total processes
and Applications (part of Application Relative to the Alignment between Application
Architecture); Architecture and Information Architecture we have,
between Applications (part of Application nEMA nGM ,where:
Architecture) and Information (part of AlinAA _ AI = 1
+ 1 /2
ntE nGM + nGA
Information Architecture). nEMA represents the number of entities managed by
In Figure 3, we present the rules that allow us to more than one application system (Rule 3.1 negation)
quantify the alignment. As mentioned, the
nGM represents the number of cases managed
Alignment is based on three dimensions, and these manually (Rule 3.2 negation)
individually quantified allow us to quantify the
alignment as one (Pereira, 2003). nGA represents the number of cases managed
automatically among application systems
ntE, number of total entities
Business
-Rule 1.1 - All entities are created (C) only Architecture - Rule 2.1 - Each business process should be
With the formulas presented it is possible to
by one process
- Rule 1.2 - All processes create, update supported by at least one application system quantify separately each one of the dimensions
- Rule 2.2 - All application systems must be
and/or delete (CUD) at least one entity
- Rule 1.3 - All entities are read (R) at least associated with at least one business process presented in the alignment, being the level of
by one process alignment obtained by the average of the obtained
values for each one of those dimensions.
Information Application
Architecture Architecture
- Rule 3.1 - An entity is managed by
only one application system
- Rule 3.2 - The data management
4.3 Assessing ISA quality indicators
should be automatic among the
application systems
nPE represents the number of processes that create, Fnew function implemented by the propose project
update and/or delete (CUD) at least one entity (Rule 1.2) Fold function implemented by the propose project that
already exist in other systems in the organization
nErP represents the number of entities that are read
Integration indicator defined as:
(R) by at least one process (Rule 1.3)
Integration Cost Pr oject Costs
ntE, number of total entities
ntP, number of total processes Technology change indicator defined as:
nBPwAS represents the number of business process IEexistCUD informational entity Created, Updated or
Deleted by the systems proposed but already exist in
without any support by an application system (Rule 2.1
other organization systems
negation)
IEnew informational entity Created, Updated or Deleted
ntS, number of total application systems by the systems proposed.
Informational entity model compatibility indicator, section 4.4 in evaluating a project in the Portuguese
defined as: Health Care System.
, where The project proponent is a large Portuguese
IE Re f . Model IE new
hospital with about 5000 employees (1000 medical
IERe f . Model Informational entity, which attributes doctors). In the past, the hospital information
differed from Information entity reference model. systems (IS) grown as independent information
IEnew informational entity Created, Updated or Deleted
islands (according to hospital health care units). The
by the systems proposed. project proposal described here focus on a particular
business process: the drug management process, see
We have defined several other ISA evaluation Figure 4.
indicators considering financial, project, business resource resource resource
Prescribe Drug
resource
Clinical process
Drug
resource
Clinical process
Drug
Patient Treatment Drug Therapy Preparation Drug Administration
The approach described in (Vasconcelos et. al.,
2004) revealed to be useful when evaluating new IS resource
resource
Drug Therapy
resource
Drug
projects that should be part of a previously defined Administrative process Patient
when measuring IS/business alignment. We address Figure 4. Drug Management Business Process
this issue in next section.
This business process consumes and produces
several informational entities as drug, patient, drug
4.4 An integrated ISA evaluation prescription, health care professional,
approach administrative/management personnel and drug
supplier. The drug and drug prescription
In order to measure the ISA quality, we realized informational entities add additional attributes and
that in the approach described in previous section alter the format of existing ones. Figure 5 presents
the business/system alignment measure was poorly the Drug informational entity.
accomplished (for example the approach does not E n t it y N a m e D ru g I n fo rm a tio n a l E n tity n . 1 1 .1
I d e n tifie r nam e
shows if an entity is created by multiple business T ype T h in g
D e s c r ip tio n S u b s ta n c e u s e d f o r m e d ic a l p u rp o s e s s o ld o n p h a r m a c ie s ,
processes). Thus, in this paper, we will present an p r o d u c e in la b o r a to r ie s o r in th e p h a r m a c y .
R e la t io n s is p re s c r ib e b y a n p h y s ic ia n ( 1 2 .1 )
approach to integrate the concepts beyond the is u s e d in a p a tie n t ( 1 )
is p re p a re d b y a p h a r m a c is t ( 1 2 .3 )
IS/Business formulas described in section 4.2 in the n u rs e (1 2 .2 ) m a y e n s u re p a tie n t is h a v in g c o rr e c tly th e
d ru g
approach described in 4.3, in order to have a global
ISA evaluation approach.
Figure 5. Drug Informational Entity
Thus, in addition to the quality indicators
described in section 4.3, we propose to integrate the Currently this business process is badly
concepts presents on the alignment formulas as a supported throw the Hospital Drug System (HDS)
detail view of the Functional Overlapping and that only supports the pharmaceutical activities and
Informational Entity Overlapping indicators. poorly supports physicians and nurses activities.
By this we are trying to improve the ISA This project is expected to deliver an IS that
evaluation as set of several dimensions and one of supports the full business process and thus reducing
those dimensions is the alignment among business, prescription mistakes (mostly cause by paper based
systems and information. physician prescription), minimizing nurses wasted
Applying the alignment formulas to the ISA time in copying drug prescription from paper to
evaluation can help us to understand it not only as a the system and reducing process time by 30% to
horizontal and global assessment but also as a 60%. The proposed integrated drug management
composition of some restricted and vertical views. system (IDMS) application architecture is described
In the following section, we show the first in Figure 6.
experiences results using the alignment formulas IS B lo c k
ID M S
onto a Portuguese project.
5 FIRST EXPERIENCE
IS B lo c k IS B lo c k IS B lo c k
D r u g D r u g P a tie n t D ru g
P r e s c r ip tio n A d m in is tr a tio n P re p a ra tio n
This section presents our first attempt to apply Figure 6. Proposed integrated drug management system
the integrated ISA evaluation approach described in (IDMS) application hierarchical view
Considering the evaluation indicators, integrated to re-evaluate the project proposal. Currently we are
with the IS/Business formulas, we developed the waiting for the new proposal.
project evaluation. In this section, only some of the
ISA quality indicators are described.
In terms of ISA, the IDMS presents some 6 CONCLUSIONS
functional overlapping with the HDS, once it will
implement some operations that already exist in the This paper describes our vision on major
HDS such as drug creation, search, update and information system architecture open issues. We
delete as well as drug prescription functions. Thus, started by presenting ISA concepts and ISA relations
the functional overlapping indicator with other edging research areas (as software
( Fold Fnew) presents a value near 0.4 (meaning architecture and enterprise architecture). Consi-
that about 40% of functions already exist in current dering the technological and conceptual mess on
systems). ISA area this paper establishes a common referential
Project Integration costs are very high (40% of for ISA hot research topics, namely: ISA Modelling,
project cost), 70% of which are related with the ISA Methodology, ISA Evaluation, IS Architectural
integration between HDS and IDMS. Styles and Patterns, and IS/Business Alignment.
At technological level, IDMS is based on Besides setting a vision on ISA domain, we
different technologies than the reference model ones describe our current approach to ISA evaluation.
(namely the IT platform and server hardware), This approach is based on our previous work and, in
presenting a technology change indicator of 0.5 this paper, we combine it with IS/business alignment
(meaning that about half of project technologies are measures. The proposed approach was used for
new technologies for the organization). evaluating an IS health care project.
The IDMS presents an informational entity This first experience confirmed that the approach
overlapping indicator ( IEexist CUD IEnew ) provides the tools (namely measures) for evaluating
CUD
of 1, meaning that all the informational entities and ISA considering existing IS and business
create, updated or deleted in the proposed system processes. However, in this first evaluation, we
already exist in other organization systems, which notice some difficulties in putting together all the
justifies the project high integration costs. different measures in order to have a final evaluation
Considering the global ISA, the IDMS presents a grade. Thus, we are now working on combining all
interface disregarding indicator near 1, meaning that the measures in a fully integrated approach.
almost all interfaces provided by the IDMS do not Currently we are planning to build an ISA best
respect at technological level the standard defined in practices database and integrate this knowledge in an
the hospital ISA plan. ISA Computer Aided Evaluation methodology and
We also realized that 31% of entities are created tool.
by more than one process (Rule 1.1, Figure 3) and
this happens because the same entity is partial used
by several processes. Some processes (9%) never 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
created/updated/deleted at least one entity, being
against Rule 1.2, but this result is justified because The research presented in this paper was possible
these are the processes that elaborate the statistics thanks to the support of Sade XXI and several
reports. In the alignment between business processes Portuguese health care organizations.
and information, Rule 1.3 was fully satisfied, all
entities are read at least by one process. As final
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