Examice

Scenario -

You are working as a consultant to the Chief Architect at a government agency responsible for securing all government communications and information systems.

The agency has recently received funding for a program that will upgrade the reliability and performance of its secure communication systems which provide real- time, highly secure communication of voice, video, and message data to remote locations around the world.

The agency has an established enterprise architecture (EA) capability based on TOGAF 9. The Executive Director of the agency is the sponsor of the EA capability.

Since reliable, high-performance, and secure communications are essential to preserving national security, the Executive Director has placed more stringent requirements for the architecture for the upgraded system. It must be able to provide assurance and verification of specific performance measures on the key services that are most crucial for system operation. Focusing on these service-level details and specific measurements will allow more stringent requirements to be enforced in service contracts. It will also provide a high degree of assurance that necessary performance is being delivered and that notifications will occur if any critical service fails to perform as required.

A portion of the program budget has been allocated to conduct a review of the EA. The scope of the review is to evaluate the processes, content and governance of the EA capability to ensure that the higher target performance and service levels required by the upgraded system can be achieved.

The Chief Architecture has noted that the core EA artifacts that have been used since TOGAF 9 was introduced are not adequate to describe these new capabilities. The artifacts do not have explicit provisions for defining the in-depth measurement requirements regarding specific services required for the system.

She has learned that certain services within the current system have service measurement implementations that match some of the new requirements, but they are only used in a few areas.

Recent EA efforts at another national agency have produced generalized high-performance communication system models to realize similar requirements in a critical defense system involving secure communications. It is possible that these models may be useful for the upgrade program.

You have been asked to make recommendations for tailoring the Architecture Content Metamodel to accommodate the requirements of the upgraded system.

Based on TOGAF, which of the following is the best answer?

Since some artifacts will now require specific measurements and additional data will be needed to support the performance objectives linked to these measurements, you recommend that the motivation and governance extensions of the TOGAF 9 Content Metamodel are used. Using these extensions will allow modeling the goals, objectives and drivers for the architecture, linking them to service levels and more detailed governance models. This will also enable the ability to re-use existing profiles, customizing them for the various service contracts involved.

You recommend all of the TOGAF 9 Content Metamodel extensions be incorporated into the Architecture Content Metamodel. The full Content Metamodel will enable the EA team to capture and categorize all the important additional data needed to support the performance and measurement objectives linked to these artifacts. Once the new repository content has been implemented, on-demand queries can be used to generate a customized governance stakeholder view that isolates the artifacts and data needed to assess measurement for any particular service. If this view is found to be inadequate for the governance concerns, the service models within those artifacts can be expanded.

Since this case requires extensions of the modeling and data details of the service, this is best done by using the services extension of the TOGAF 9 Content Metamodel. By using this extension, the service model is no longer constrained by what is expected in typical business service definitions, allowing more flexibility for adding customized models to support the more stringent measurement requirements. The services extension can also be used to map terminology between the business services and the application components.

To support the type of stringent performance measurements needed for the more detailed governance views required for the upgraded system, the interfaces to the communication and network layer of the architecture must be highly visible at the application level. To accommodate the proper development of this, a Communications Engineering view should be created from the infrastructure extension models of the TOGAF Content Metamodel. This view will allow architects to align the required performance measurement communications across the system.