System Architect (software) - Overview

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, software architects, and so forth. 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%).

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.