Category Archives: UML

Demand Manager @ PV Group

From January 1st 2017 until Sept 15th 2017, I worked as “IT Demand Excellence Manager” at PVGroup.

I managed a team of about 5 Enterprise IT architects and 5 Domain Experts (Non-Life, Life, Claims, Employee Benefits and Front).

This was a very good team to aim at the description of the complete Enterprise Architecture : from Business Processes to Technical Infrastructure.

Together we developed an interesting “Enterprise Architecture” process with several activities:

  • Intake
  • Production
  • Review
  • Validation
  • Harvesting

This was the ITDEME  (IT Demand Excellence) process.

In addition we were busy with building some new digital foundations : ESB, ECM, IAM……

Strategies for your enterprise architecture: people or documentation ?

Here is an interesting thought of a colleague yesterday (Thomas Vermassen – Lead Architect ORES) on documenting IT systems:

You have basically two strategies for keeping your Enterprise Architecture knowledge under control.

The first one is to capitalize on people. If your organization is stable enough you can assign clear responsibilities and you should be able to find the right information by finding the right person.

The second one is to capitalize on documentation. Through deliverables you make sure everything is described as it should be. This is most suitable if you have a high collaborators turnover like when you work with a lot of sub-contractors.

The ideal world is probably to have both.

I’m a deliverable minded person and I so I tend to prefer the second one. I value information sharing as it often avoids job protection and silo thinking. The notion of deliverable is also linked to another value that I like : personal contribution.

Also when the architecture is complex I don’t see how you can just book a meeting with someone in oder for him to explain you the 100 business processes in scope. That must be why clever people write books……

How to search for objects with name containing ‘?’ in SPARX Enterprise Architect ?

I had to search more than 2 minutes for this, so I post it.

The question is how to escape special characters in the SPARX EA search.

Answer : You need to escape the ? using square braquets: [?]

Since the wildcard is ‘*’, the SQL is

SELECT Name FROM t_object where NAME like ‘*[?]*’

Useful links:

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Php to UML with bouml

For our startup, we have coded many classes in php. As the code grows, it becomes difficult to have a good overview of all the attributes and methods.

I tested yesterday bouml (that I had for long time on all my machines) to reverse enginner the code. The result is fast and efficient. I now have a nice uml diagram with all my classes.…