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The Business Perception of MDA
IBM Rational's Alan Brown shares his views on pattern-based development and model-driven architectures for realizing enterprise business goals
by the Editors of Java Pro

April 6, 2005

Alan Brown

Alan Brown, a distinguished engineer at IBM Rational software, maps out future product strategy for IBM Rational's design and construction products. His responsibilities include defining technical strategy and evangelizing product direction with customers who need to improve software development efficiency through visual modeling, code generation from abstract models, and reuse. Brown recently participated in an exclusive interview with Java Pro editors to talk about the five major areas for software development in 2005 that he identified recently in a blog entry (see Resources) as well as his position on patterns, modeling, and interoperability.

Java Pro: You've laid out in your blog five areas that you think will be important in software development this year and how Rational/IBM will address them. These areas include a focus on the business/IT gap, design and modeling for services and SOAs, MDA and UML2, domain-specific languages, and modeling and visualization of software and systems. Based on these observations, how do you think MDA will help close the business/IT gap?

Alan Brown: What we've been thinking about in terms of some of the issues that customers face today is that they typically are trying to work at multiple levels at the same time. Typically, there's a lot of confusion between the business needs that business analysts have and those that overall executives of the organization have for the business goals, which is what the IT infrastructure folks can deliver. So we've been looking at how business folks use that knowledge they have, that business understanding they have, and the kinds of business processes they're looking at implementing—how can they use that description that they have as a driver for the IT systems that they're going to use to supply that need?

So we're thinking about how you can create what you might call a business contract between the business folks and the IT folks that use those initial designs, those business models, as the driver for the IT organization. These models that are being created are in the form of model-driven development, model-driven architecture, essentially have a computation-independent model of how the business wants to operate. And that's mapped into the IT infrastructure in terms of how you're going to implement those solutions.

What's happening right now with our tools and customers is that they're using technologies such as WebSphere Business Integration modeling technology to model their business processes, and then the IT organization uses those same models and transforms them into design for the systems that will realize those business needs. In that way we think that that's an important and key direction for folks to use model-driven architecture—not just at the level of giving a design to the code and generating an implementation itself in some programming language, but also to think about model-driven architecture from the point of view of how the business perceives it, in business problems, and how we transform those into the IT architectural solutions.