Enterprise Architecture and IT City Planning
IT City Planning is an architectural approach that was developed by the Frenchman Jacques Sassoon in the 1980s. The aim of IT City Planning is to bring harmony to a heterogeneous system landscape by thoroughly analyzing its interactions, that is, the exchange of information among the applications in that system.
Based on the approach used in town planning, the procedure for drawing up an IT city plan is driven by the idea of enabling long-term, strategic IT management that considers not only the present but also aspects of the past (legacy systems) and those of the future.
However, there is no need to redesign the entire system. Instead, a project-by-project, incremental approach is adopted.
As with Model Driven Architecture (MDA),which is supported by ARIS products, the subject of IT City Planning can be approached through models that describe the information system without reference to technology-related information. However, IT City Planning dispenses with UML, which simplifies familiarization with the subject for those with a less technical background, and increases its acceptance.