The CORA Model

Introduction

This is the sixth blog in a series about Capgemini's Technovison and the mapping onto CORA. In the first blog Technovision was explained, being in short the provisioning of a clear picture of the information technologies that are the most relevant to the organizations' business drivers and how these technologies and their evolution will impact business.

With Technovision the business drivers are mapped to innovations as an input to the IT-Strategy. With the CORA model the gap between the IT strategy and actual implementation of software is bridged because the CORA model can be used at different levels (Enterprise level, project implementation level) and has the possibility to design and implement elements with a mixture of ‘architecture styles’ on the best fitted platform available (or planned).

By mapping the 17 identified key information technology trends within Technovision onto the layers and logical elements of the CORA model the impact on the IT landscape is visualized and assessed in more detail. In the second, third, fourth and fifth the key information technology trends within the "You Experience", "We Collaborate", "Process-on-the-Fly"and "Thriving on Data"cluster. In this blog post this is described regarding the "Sector-as-a-Service" cluster.

The "Sector-as-a-Service" describe the technology changes to the foundation of the systems, the part of the systems that should work continuously and with high reliability.

Through explicit simplification and rationalization, organizations can now liberate themselves from having to build and maintain bespoke legacy systems that do not provide differentiating value.

Furthermore, automation of standard and non-differentiating business services is increasingly provided by third parties on an outsourced basis, either through the software-as-a-service model or through prepackaged software. These help change an existing landscape of bespoke, highly customized and heterogeneous solutions into a more simple, utility-style set of (sector-related) business services. 

The following capabilities ("Technology Trends" or "Building blocks") are part of this cluster:

• Packaged Sector Solutions: standard, package-based software to support core business services within organizations.
• Software-as-a-Service: a model of software deployment where an application is hosted as a service provided to usersacross the Internet.
  

As shown in the figure the capabilities have a clear focus on the Application and Integration Layer. The other horizontal layers are layers supporting this layer depending on the architectural style used. For the sake of simplicity the capabilities are described separately, but combinations of capabilities are possible.

Packaged Sector Solutions

Because many solutions/platforms are built based on the N-tier architecture style or a combination of N-tier and SOA architecture style special care must be taken when assessing them.

Software-as-a-Service