EA Guiding Principles

Enterprise Architecture Guiding Principles help define the criteria by which technology and services that span or impact the enterprise are managed, acquired, designed and configured.

Click each Guiding Principle to learn more:

Standards Based

Purpose: Standards help to ensure consistency, thus improving the ability to support/manage systems, improve usability, and reduce technical costs.

Concept

Embrace industry and community standards.
Prefer open standards, architectures, and systems over closed, proprietary ones.
Standardize to reduce needless diversity.

Achieving this Guiding Principle

Best Practice

Application functionality is delivered to users via web-based UI’s that comply with current web standards.

Systems are designed to externalize user authentication by integrating with enterprise authentication services.

Web service URIs and Event messages conform to UW Standards and Best Practices.

Systems are designed to externalize authorization by integrating with enterprise access management services.

Applications using enterprise data integrate with UW’s Access and Use Agreement.

Simple

Purpose: Ease-of-use encourages users to readily adopt and work within the integrated information environment instead of developing isolated systems to accomplish their tasks. Solutions should follow patterns and blueprints to reduce complexity and increase maintainability. Training is kept to a minimum, and the risk of using or altering a system improperly is lowered.

Concept

Make things as simple as possible but no simpler.
Follow well-defined patterns and blueprints.
Minimize duplication and reduce complexity.
Make things easy to understand.
Make things easy to use.

Achieving this Guiding Principle

Best Practice

Web services are registered in the UW Web Services Registry.

Applications are easy to use. The underlying technology is transparent to users, so they can concentrate on tasks at hand.

User interfaces are intuitive.

Scalable

Purpose: Accommodate business work load and data growth in a capable and cost-effective manner.

Concept

Strive for statelessness
Make aggressive use of caching
Design scalability into solutions from the start
Enable distribution of workload
Design solutions to scale horizontally out, not up
Communicate asynchronously between services; accept some data inconsistency
Use virtualization and Cloud to meet unexpected or spiky demand

Achieving this Guiding Principle

Best Practice

Applications and services are designed to distribute load amongst clusters of servers and are designed for “scale-out”, as opposed to “scale-up”.

New servers are deployed using virtualization.

Applications and services are stateless.

Applications and services are monitored continuously and adjust automatically to problems or changing capacity requirements.

Applications and services avoid relational database storage unless required for OLTP.

Systems use read-only copies of data to meet high demand data access requirements.

Service Oriented

Purpose: Promotes re-usability, granularity, modularity, statelessness, loose coupling in solution design. In business terms, this translates into business process flexibility and growth (improved information flow), cost savings, and business advantage opportunities.

Concept

Deliver business functionality as modular, reusable, loosely-coupled services and messages.
Design services and messages to have well-defined interfaces and data models.
Design modular components; create building blocks not monoliths.
Enable reuse of data and functionality.
Make services and messages discoverable.
Define boundaries to enable separation of concerns.

Achieving this Guiding Principle

Best Practice

Web service API’s are modeled and designed according to the principles of REST using HTTP 1.1.

Services and their APIs use version strings and document how compatibility is managed between version changes.

Resources exist in at most one web service.

Systems and applications subscribe to events to know when external data has changed.

Systems and applications call Web services to interact with enterprise data.

Systems and applications publish events when external systems need to know when data has changed.

Systems and applications call enterprise Web services for workflow, identity, notification, and document management needs.

Every unique business function is automated by at most one service.

All application functionality is API-enabled.

Strategic

Purpose: Align decisions and architecture to the strategic mission, vision and values of the University.

Concept

Enable a single federated enterprise-wide architecture.
Align decisions and architecture with the strategic mission, vision and values of the University.
Align decisions and architecture with the UW-IT Strategic Plan.
Take a strategic “big picture” viewpoint when making decisions.
Avoid strategic compromises during tactical projects.
Support long-term business-driven capabilities.

Achieving this Guiding Principle

Best Practice

Application UI’s comply with current accessibility standards.

Cloud first.

Reliable

Purpose: Benefits of reliable solutions (accurate, on time, and available during expected time frames) are extended solution life, reduced maintenance cost, improved user adoption, business process stability.

Concept

Avoid single points of failure; a system is only as reliable as its weakest link.
Define and design for target availability levels.
Design for fault tolerance and graceful failure.

Achieving this Guiding Principle

Best Practice

Applications and services have defined service levels and are architected appropriately to provide that level of service.

Services do not communicate directly with other services.

All data entering a system are validated.

Services do not communicate with other services

Data Driven

Purpose: Collecting, managing and using data effectively leads to data informed decisions, an enabler of improved business process, agility and innovation.

Concept

Govern data according to University policies and data management guidelines.
Manage authoritative data as a single source of truth.
Make data available and discoverable.
Enrich data with well-defined metadata.

Achieving this Guiding Principle

Best Practice

Data consumers adhere to the data policies, business rules, and usage constraints defined for the data to which they have access.

Data consumers communicate the data policies, business rules, quality standards, and usage constraints defined for the data they share with other consumers.

Systems are designed to ensure all user data is programmatically accessible.

Enterprise data are available real-time.

Web services are designed to align with the UW Data Map

Sustainable

Purpose: Balance long-term business capability needs with cost effective technology solutions. Solutions are manageable, maintainable, measurable.

Concept

Make things maintainable, manageable and measurable.
Enable measurement of system performance.
Design for monitoring, logging, run-time tuning and diagnostics.
Make decisions based on the full lifecycle of things.
Design for extensibility.
Make things testable.
Document knowledge needed by others; an undocumented system is not maintainable.

Achieving this Guiding Principle

Best Practice

Applications and services are not designed with dependencies on deprecated components [1]; they may depend on contained components [2].

Applications and services log events and produce alerts needed to measure service levels and other metrics.

Business rules and other system behaviors are configurable via Web-based UIs.

Systems are auditable; all activities are logged.

New applications and services are built using established development frameworks.

Glossary:

[1] A Deprecated component is one that is (or will be) phased out from usage.

[2] A Contained component is no longer available for new usage.

Secure

Purpose: Hardware, information systems and data are protected from unintended or unauthorized access, change or destruction. Security also includes protection from unplanned events and natural disasters.

Concept

Protect information according to University policies using cost-effective access controls.
Make decisions based on the classification and value of assets.
Secure the boundaries between architectural components.
Consider malicious threats and accidental misuse.
Ensure confidentiality, integrity and availability of information.
Control access using authentication and authorization.
Manage University risk.

Achieving this Guiding Principle

Best Practice

Systems are designed with appropriate controls to protect data confidentiality, integrity, and availability based on asset, value, and risk.

Applications and services log all impersonation requests.

Impersonation requests do not include user passwords.