A system architect in an
Enterprise needs to have a comprehensive view of all Enterprise
internal and external relationships and information flows. From
this viewpoint, one can speak about holistic (from Greek
olos, whole)
architecture, meaning description of a system or part of it, but
keeping into account "the whole".
If we look at the classical classification of the enterprise
systems on Enterprise Support Systems (ESS), Operation Support
Systems (OSS), and Business Support Systems (BSS), we see that
each of these classes relates with both all other classes and
external entities such as customers, providers, banks, public
administration, and so on. This scenario is better referred to
as Extended Enterprise. In an Extended Enterprise, some of the
services and interfaces that are available in an Enterprise
system must be made available also to external entities, yet
maintaining acceptable levels of security, dependability and
safety.
To deal with the general issue of Extended
Enterprises, Lecit Consulting decided to summon the multi-year
experiences of its professionals, to define a development
method for IT architectures that:
- is up to date with state of the art
and state of the practice technologies
- is complete, in the sense that it
covers the whole architecture life cycle
- is modular, because under given
conditions it can provide intermediate products without the
need to transverse all classical development phases
- is iterative both among phases and
inside phases
 The CLAMP©
methodology (Complex/Light
Architectures Management
Process) allows for a development style
that, by keeping into account the whole aims and scope of the
IT architecture, and keeping full control of all requirements
in terms of their impacts, yet does not impose detailed
descriptions of what is not of strict interest, so being
adaptable to the development of both simple and complex
architectures.
CLAMP© analysis techniques allow to evaluate how
original requirements have (or, as it often do not have)
influenced the development of a system, and which kind of
impacts new requirements have on an existing system.
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