Vision

Standards

Performance Metrics

Unified, comprehensive, visual, easy-to-learn modeling; robust configuration management and repository support.

Usage and Dependencies

Industry Usage: Because of their complexity and long learning curves, data modeling tools don't change as fast as many other technology products, and often outlive their vendors. The established products have been around since the client/server days. CA's ERwin has for many years been the most popular enterprise data modeling tool, despite its high cost.

Competition at lower price points is increasing: Embarcadero (ER/Studio), for example, is an alternative source that is gaining market share. Sybase acquired PowerSoft in 1995 and has renamed its S-Designer product to PowerDesigner, which has expanded its capabilities in UML-based object modeling. Popkin Software provides System Architect in this product category. These are all relatively expensive and broad-based tools that meet many different needs in the development lifecycle. A new and lower-cost object design tool is Ontos ObjectSpark. The successful use of any of these tools will be dependent on their ability to manage team-based code and documents in a repository, and the discipline of the team in its development process.

SC Usage: Recently SC has purchased new copies of CA's BPwin for business process modeling, and CA's ERwin for data modeling, as a part of the Lifecycle Toolset Project.

Management of the large number of documents generated by these products will be necessary. Electronic Information Management and Configuration Management projects in FY02 will support these needs in SC-65 as well as the rest of the SC organization.

The SC Information Resource Catalog (IRC) is a stand-alone Access-Visual Basic database tool. The technology architecture database is an Access-web database tool.

Project management is being supported by stand-alone copies of Microsoft Project. Project Central, a team-based project system has been installed but is not yet being used.

SC Application Impacts: All applications seeking to support an SC-wide, centralized database will benefit from the use of standard UML- and object-oriented tools. All SC applications requiring remote access capabilities will benefit from OO design considerations. The document repository for these tools should operate through the SCIP portal, like all other SC applications.

References

Previous TPS
Design Husbandry, Product Review, Intelligent Enterprise, July 23, 2001.