Far from being incompatible, these differences between Domain
Analysis and Information Engineering actually reflect orthogonal
and highly complementary concerns. The reuse-based
interoperability fostered by IE has an important role to play in
many organizations adopting DA. The MIS area is not alone in
requiring systems to communicate, share information, or support
collaboration among their users. Following are several scenarios
showing the need for an IE perspective in traditional DA arenas:
- Strategic and tactical DoD systems, manufacturing and
process control systems, even CASE tools must
frequently interoperate or support user collaboration to
fulfill complex functions or missions.
- Several DA approaches recommend scoping small
subsystem-level domains, acknowledging that systems
will later be assembled from assets spanning several
domains.
In the above scenarios, the need for the multi-domain
interoperability architecture provided by IE cannot be overstated.
On the other hand, many enterprises adopting IE have considerable
variation among functionally similar systems, the objects within
them, or the environments in which they are developed and operate.
The DA approach to control and management of this commonality
and variability is potentially invaluable to such organizations.
Following are several scenarios showing the need for a DA
perspective in traditional IE arenas:
- Large enterprises often have decentralized operations,
with significant distribution of, and consequent
variability among, core functions. Frequently, they also
have decentralized data processing responsibilities, with
heterogeneous system and application hardware,
software, development processes and standards, etc.
- Scores of similar MIS applications, and even similar
enterprise models, are "developed to spec" by external
companies for whom such work constitutes a line of
business.
- Even less complex organizations may discover that
many of the entities of interest to different functions are
actually variants of the same object (e.g. Customers,
employees, suppliers, contractors, affiliates, etc. are all,
potentially, variants of "person"; in some cases, it may
be important that they are occasionally the same person.
Reuse of the more generic concept "person" offers both
potential definitional and information value.)
In all of the above examples, the adoption of DA to manage the
reuse of commonality and optimize the variability among the
systems and environments would prove invaluable.