Phase D: Technology Architecture
What Phase D is for
Phase D defines the Technology Architecture that supports the target Business and Information Systems Architectures: hardware, software infrastructure, networks, communications and processing, plus the technology standards and principles that constrain them. It runs baseline to target with gap analysis and produces candidate roadmap components for Phase E.
Core artifacts: Technology Standards catalog, Technology Portfolio catalog, Application/Technology matrix, and the Platform Decomposition, Environments and Locations, Communications Engineering, Processing, and Networked Computing/Hardware diagrams. The Technology Standards catalog is the reference point for procurement and compliance questions.
Traps
- Phase D is architecture, not detailed design or a bill of materials. Low-level configuration options are out of scope.
- Environments and Locations covers development, test and production environments and their sites, not organization locations (that is Phase B).
- Technology standards must comply with the Architecture Principles from the Preliminary Phase; inventing standards outside governance is wrong.
- Emerging technology impacts are assessed here and revisited through Phase H change management.
Worked rule of thumb
Draw the chain: business service, then IS service or application, then technology component. If a proposed technology component cannot be traced upward to an application, it is a candidate for removal from the target. Use the Application/Technology matrix to prove the mapping before agreeing the gap list.