5 Lessons learned

  1. SOAVIS – 1 Introduction
  2. 2 Some background information
  3. 2.1 The organisation and ICT infrastructure
  4. 2.2 Five layer SOA architecture
  5. 2.3 Additional terminology in the SOA architecture
  6. 3 Implemented SOA visualisation
  7. 3.1 Central repository
  8. 3.2 EAI Wiki
  9. 4 Future developments
  10. 5 Lessons learned

The main benefits of the MediaWiki used as visualisation tool are:

  1. Visibility.
    The EAI Wiki is an attractive presentation mechanism. Colleagues who use it, are eager to share it with others and thus spread the news.
  2. Accessibility.
    The EAI Wiki is accessible for everyone with access to the intranet; it is web based and easy and intuitive to use. Relations between entities can be followed by hyperlinks to traverse the contents.
  3. Possibility to add contents by other users.
    Each EAI Wiki page contains a link to a “Notes” page. As other users traverse the EAI Wiki pages, they can add remarks to that page on its related “Notes” page. An automated feedback mechanism notifies the EAI Wiki content manager when information is added.
  4. Complete overviews.
    The Chain page shows the overview of ALL services related to the chain; and similar for the Component and System pages. When a certain service is changed, it is clear which services are affected.
  5. Simple page updates.
    The main content of the EAI Wiki is generated from the central repository which ensures a consistent presentation.
  6. Dynamic page creation.
    Using MediaWiki page templates, most EAI Wiki pages are generated dynamically. Each service only defines the entities it is using which implies that a relationship is only defined once. All relations are processed when a page is generated. This means that the impact of a newly defined relation is visible immediately.
  7. However, some of the drawbacks of the MediaWiki are:

  8. Complex data model.
    The data stored in the EAI Wiki is processed from structured import files into the MediaWiki internal database structure which is relatively complex.
  9. Performance.
    As each page is generated dynamically based on the information present at that moment, the presentation of the EAI Wiki is relatively slow.
  10. Accessibility.
    As the EAI Wiki is accessible for everyone with access to the intranet; it is hard to prevent unwanted use and updates of crucial data. Also when a new set of data is imported from the central repository, manual updates are lost.

All in all, at the moment we can conclude that the EAI Wiki is a success in the organisation. This can be deducted from the questions which arise from colleagues in other departments who have seen the EAI Wiki. The main question is “When will all information be available in the EAI Wiki?”

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