Adaptable and Scalable Designs

As the e-business revolution continues to mature, corporations are realizing many of the anticipated benefits. Customers, suppliers, employees, and other stakeholders are carrying out complex, collaborative business activities through new online channels that are yielding increases both in revenues and productivity. But, with the rapid sprawl of enabling technologies, content, and solutions have come unwanted side effects that have undercut the success of many projects. Increasingly, business users are disappointed with solutions that:

• Are difficult to use and poorly adopted
• Are expensive to maintain and difficult to extend
• Constrained by product limitations and are delivering less functionality than originally desired.

The IT Challenge

Corporate IT groups find it extremely challenging to design solutions with compelling and effective user interfaces and robust (and often complex) business functionality given the limited capabilities and constraints of available software products. The problem only worsens as portals grow and become increasingly unwieldy.

In response to these challenges, and leveraging LDS' Informed Design philosophy to optimize design tradeoffs, LDS employs the following specific practices in our Informed Design approach:

• Explicit Designs — We strive to make explicit all the important elements of our portal designs. We utilize standard design modeling tools and practices where possible, such as the UML. We also extend those tools and practices with our own, where required, to address areas not adequately handled by standard approaches.
• Pattern-Based Design — We leverage patterns in both standard and innovative ways. For instance, we use patterns to describe presentation concepts in terms of presentation elements in order to capture those common and recurring structures.
• Model-Based Architecture — One way we separate concerns in our design space is to separate presentation functionality and behavior from the technologies used to implement them. By using model-based architecture as the organizing framework, we leverage models as the medium to describe design concepts and patterns. Model-Driven Architecture (MDA), which comes from the Object Management Group (OMG), is a particular formalization of this design approach. Our portal designs employ both a Logical Model (platform independent view) and an Implementation Model (platform-specific view). Transformation defines how to map from the Logical Model to the Implementation Model.

LDS' Enterprise Portal Solution design leverages the Informed Design framework to integrate pattern-based design and model-based architecture to balance the user experience, business functionality and technical solution design perspectives.