A 4+2 Model View of SCM Solution Architecture

My interests in CM, architecture, and agility all overlap in my day-to-day work. I think the convergence is in developing what I call an "SCM Solution Architecture". Some might regard it as the SCM "component" of an overall Enterprise Architecture that includes SCM. I believe many of the principles, patterns, and practices of system architecture and software architecture apply to such an SCM solution architecture.

If we take the 4+1views approach of Rational's Unified Process (RUP), which defines the critical architectural stakeholder "views" as: logical, physical (implementation), processing (processing & parallelism), deployment, and use-cases/scenarios, and if we enhance those with one more view, that of the organization itself, then we arrive at a Zachman-like set of RUP-compatible views for an SCM solution architecture that I call a "4+2" Model View of SCM Solution Architecture.

The "4+2" Model View of SCM Solution Architecture contains 6 different views, that I characterize as follows:

• 1. Project {Logical Change/Request Mgmt} -- e.g., change-requests, change-tasks, other CM "domain" abstractions and their inter-relationships, etc.)



• 2. Environment {Solution Deployment Environment} -- e.g., repositories, servers/networks, workspaces, application integration



• 3. Product {Physical/Implementation/Build} -- e.g., repository structure and organization, build-management scheme and structure/organization



• 4. Evolution {Change-Flow and Parallelism} -- e.g., tasks, codelines, branching and merging/propagation, labeling/tagging



• +1. Process {Contextual Scenarios/Use-cases} -- e.g., workflow, work processes, procedures and practices



• +2. Organization {Social/People Structures} -- e.g., organizational structure for CCBs, work-groups, sites, and their interactions, and corresponding organizational metrics/reports for accounting and tracing back to the value-chain. (Mario Moreira's "SCM Implementation" book has a great chapter or two on the importance of this and some best-practices for it)

The fact that many of the views closely align with RUP suggest that UML might be a very suitable diagramming notation for modeling such an architecture. And I think that much of the current best-practices of enterprise architecture, agility, object-oriented design principles, and service-oriented architectures apply to the creation of an agile CM environment that represents such a solution architecture.