System design

To design your system, identify and define your business processes and information model. Your processes and information model can help you decide what communities, categories, and asset types your system needs.

  • An information model is composed of asset types, category schemas, relationship types, and asset attributes. In each community, lifecycles define how assets are created, managed, and consumed.
  • Each community is configured for access control, roles, permissions, review processes, and lifecycles of the assets of the community.

Communities

The first level of governance in a system is defined by its Communities. You create a community by identifying a target audience that has, or must use, assets that must be governed in a certain way. Communities can have different foundations:
  • Organization: You might create a community that is based on the organization chart.
  • Role: You might create a community that is based on a role that crosses organizational boundaries, such as Analyst or Developer.
  • Project: You might create a community that is based on a project, or initiative.

System designers identify and then define these communities. After you define a community and specify its administrator, that administrator defines the roles in the community. The community administrator also defines the permissions of those roles and assigns users or groups to the roles.

Asset types

System designers must also consider the users of the system and how they interact with assets in the following ways:
  • Using assets
  • Finding assets
  • Creating assets
  • Creating new versions of assets
  • Deprecating old assets
  • Tracing assets
  • Adding dependencies to assets

If an asset type is global to all communities, it is defined at the repository level. Other types might be governed in a more secure community or might be specific to a community. These types are configured at the community level. Before you can configure asset types to a community, that community must be defined.

Each asset type is associated with a lifecycle, which includes states and actions that are governed by roles and policies. Community administrators can configure each lifecycle type to govern the business process, review process, and asset lifecycle.

Collaboration, governance, and maintenance

Consider the following aspects of asset management when you design your system:

  • Asset collaboration and understanding:

    Plan the types and versions of assets that are required and how are they related.

  • Asset governance:

    Determine which policies must be met, who must review certain assets, and how certain assets are accessed.

  • Asset discovery and maintenance:

    Determine the processes for publishing, finding, maintaining, and retiring assets.

Dependencies

If you use IBM® Rational® Asset Manager as a library for shared files or common components, follow these practices to ensure optimal asset reuse:
  • Manage dependencies by defining how one required version of something depends on another version of something.
  • Automate the retrieval of required files and dependencies from repositories.
  • Develop tested sets of common components and create assets based on these sets.