Architecting Portal Solutions: Applications Development

3.3 Implement

By now you've engaged the customer to gather requirements, issues, and future goals. You've analyzed its current IT infrastructure and business model to gain an understanding of how its business operates today, and you've documented a solution architecture and created all of the related diagrams and associated documents.

At this point, it's time to obtain customer approval of your solution. This is the Implement phase, and it's here that you'll review it with the customer to make refinements and resolve any concerns still outstanding. Once this has been accomplished, you should review the guidelines on the Patterns for e-business Web site ^[21] for each of the application patterns selected. These guidelines provide tips and techniques for designing and developing the application with performance and system management in mind.

Once the pilot application has been developed, it needs to go through extensive testing and monitoring. Go back to the Critical Success Factors that you documented in the Envisioned Goals and Issues document and see if these are being met. This is how success is measured. Ensure that the customer is satisfied with the solution.

Once the engagement is complete, it's time to harvest assets and make them available for future engagements. You now have a known solution and implementation that's available for reuse.

^[21]http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/patterns/