Iteraplan

iteraplan is an Open source tool to manage Enterprise architecture with focus on the IT landscape. The aim of iteraplan is to quickly introduce EAM into an organisation, enable tool support for managing the enterprise architecture and facilitate collaboration between different EA relevant stakeholders, such as enterprise architects, project managers, IT staff.

Features

With iteraplan different fields of enterprise architecture can be analysed. The focus not only lies On It relevant parts, but the whole company is considered, like business architecture, information system architecture and technical architecture. The best practice meta-model is structured as follows.

  • Business domains are structural elements that serve to group associated elements in the business landscape.
  • Business processes are sequences of logically connected activities or sub-processes that Contribute in some way to the enterprise‘s value added. Each process has a defined start and end, is expressed in terms of performing some action for customers.
  • Business function is a distinct, cohesive set of business functionality such as “customer relationship management”. The enterprise’s capabilities are expressed in terms of the business functions it carries out.
  • A product is the outcome or deliverable of an enterprise’s service process. Products can be either material (e.g. goods such as cars or computers) or immaterial (services).
  • Business units are logical or structural units of the enterprise, such as departments, sites and plants, also logical user groups such as field sales team or internal administration.
  • A business object represents a real-world entity – abstract or concrete – which encapsulates some part of the business activity of an enterprise (customers, for example, products or orders). Business objects can be associated with one another by relationships and are used by business processes.
  • An information system domain combines information systems based on one or more criteria. It is used to categorize information systems based on the application landscape or on the responsibility.
  • An information system is software or a software package, which supports business functions.
  • Interfaces define the dependencies of information systems, whereby mostly the information flow is modeled.
  • Architecture domains are structures of the blueprint, the standardization catalogue of technical components.
  • A technical component provides information on technical implementations or interfaces. Technical components are standardized by technical standardization processes. The result is a catalogue (named technical blueprint) of standardised technical building blocks. As well as the standardised components, it might be necessary in documenting the as-is landscape to include non-standardised technical components as well.
  • Infrastructure elements are infrastructure units such as hardware or networks on which applications run (e.g. client, server, database).
  • A project is essentially a one-off activity overall, e.g. in terms of objectives, restricted timeframe, funding, personnel and other parameters, and is clear demarcation from other projects. In addition it will also have a separate organisation.

After capturing the as-is state of the architecture, the desired to-be situation can be modeled. It is possible to develop different (e.g. sequential) to-be states. Furthermore, different graphical reports can be derived from iteraplan. For example a portfolio- or information flow diagram, allocation tables or lists. All graphical reports can be configured to your needs and saved. With Excel or the XMI export function of iteraplan data can be processed to further programs and be edited there.

Licence

In addition to the free community edition, there is also a paid enterprise edition available with several additional features.

  • While the community edition only supports HSQLDB databases, the enterprise edition can also be run with MySQL or Oracle databases.
  • The use of different users, roles and permissions is possible in the enterprise edition.
  • The enterprise edition can be integrated with an existing LDAP-Server.
  • Over an data import interface initial gathering of existing data is facilitated.
  • To enable the migration to a new iteraplan release, migration scripts for the enterprise edition are available. With their help, existing data will easily be migrated into the new version.
  • The enterprise edition is available in combination with maintenance, support and introduction support through iteratec.

History

The first version of the tool was developed in 2004 by iteratec and used with customers of iteratec GmbH. The version 1.0 till 1.8 (mid of 2007) were only available as closed source. At the beginning of 2008 iteraplan became the first open source EAM tool by providing a completely revised source code of the version 2.0 on SourceForge. It was released under the open source licence [AGPL]. Since then, iteraplan has received increasing attention, e.g. from companies like HUK-COBURG, Otto, VKB-Bank but also public authorities like Hamburg Port Authority. In May 2008 the version 2.1 with fixed bugs and numerous new functions was released. In February 2009 the version 2.2 was published, marked by Refactoring. In May 2009 the new version 2.3 was published with plenty comfort functions. Currently version 3.0 is available, published in April 2012. Since 2010 there is a release in April and one in October. The company iteratec employs all active developers of this project and offers among other things consulting, training and the support of iteraplan.

Literature

  • Inge Hanschke: Strategisches Management der IT Landschaft. Ein praktischer Leitfaden für das Enterprise Architecture Management, Hanser Fachbuch, München 2009, ISBN 978-3-446-41702-1
  • Inge Hanschke: Strategic IT Management: A Toolkit for Enterprise Architecture Management, Springer, München 2010, ISBN 3-642-05033-6

iteraplan in the press

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