1. SISAI STATISTICAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS ARCHITECTURE AND INTEGRATION
WORKING GROUP 3rdMEETING MAY 2013 ITEM IT principles

2. IT principles
IT principles would provide guidance for the development of IT application and maximizing the possibility of reuse in the system (among Member States and across processes)
3rd SISAI meeting, May 2013
Jon Folkedal
System Architect, Department of IT, Statistics Norway

3. IT principles and IT architecture
GSBPM is one step towards a standardized production process
Standardized business processes require standardized IT systems
Standardization of IT systems implies creating and following an IT architecture
Underlying service orientation
Business architecture
Information architecture
IT architecture

4. Levels of IT-principles: Government (national) level (public sector in Norway)
Service orientation
Interoperability
Accessibility
Security
Openness
Flexibility
Scalability
Source:

5. Levels of IT-principles: Business level (Statistics Norway)
IT solutions shall support Statistics Norway’s business process model
IT solutions shall build upon standard methods and infrastructure
IT solutions shall use open standards
Services shall have clearly defined, technology independent interfaces
IT solutions must be platform independent and component based, shared components must be used wherever possible.
New IT solutions should be made by integrating existing and new functionality
Distinguish between user interface, business logic and data management
End-user systems shall have uniform user interfaces
Store once, reuse many times (avoid double storage)
Data and metadata must be uniquely identifiable across systems

6. Levels of IT-principles: Project /solution / system level (Project in Statistics Norway)
Examples:
Testability - The project solution architecture can easily be tested, both in total and its components - outside a production context
Holistic approach - Architecture functional and non-functional properties are treated equally. A functional requirement should not be resolved in a way that will go beyond the non-functional properties (such as security, scalability, performance, robustness, memory usage).
Continuous monitoring and verification: Supporting architecture testability and quality control automation will not require a lot of manual work. Therefore it can - and should - be done frequently.
Since the functional and non-functional characteristics are treated equally, non-functional characteristics should be measured and verified so that you can quickly reveal regressions that functionally are not visible but still a risk - for example related to reduced performance and increased memory usage.

7. Reference architecture model
Architecture principles in Statistics Norway:
Service orientation
Standardization
Component based
Consistency
Reference architecture model

8. IT governance in Statistics Norway
Business level
Portfolio management
Project management
Technical level
System architects
Solution architects

9. IT-principles at the international level
Possible core elements
Further work
Support Business Process Model(s)
Information model frameworks
Open source, open standards and open data
Integration architecture, technology and/or frameworks
Define the granularity and level of scope for IT-principles
Consider developing a principle framework rather than IT-principles for NSIs
Review existing IT-principles and reference models for IT architecture from NSIs
Stability
Why? Rationale, implication, metrics?