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CSM Import from a Systems Architect 1.5

Hello everyone, joined the apan community recently for advice.

We have direction to investigate importing of a Systems Architect 1.5 model to CSM using UAF plugin for DoDAF 2.0 Artifact Development.

The program received high level direction to move to CSM but their architecture is in Systems Architect with DoDAF 1.5 artifacts. Ideally, we would like to use a tool that would convert this 1.5 model to CSM while retaining all of the architecture diagrams. Is there anyone who has experience with this process? 

Initial investigation led us to Sodius tools, I believe these include plugins that allows CSM to import from System Architect 1.5 but one program we talked to did a cost analysis in which converting their model using this tool was more expensive than recreating the architecture due to their original model being very large and complex. My impression is that this tool works well with small models only.

Does anyone else have a different experience and/or other potential paths we may be able to investigate.

 

  • Robert Vincent Sigillito
    I have found that the Sodius tool is the only game in town. We are doing a migration from Systems Architect 11.x to Cameo Enterprise Architecture 2021x and have way too much data to start from Scratch. Additionally, if you have customization in SA they will port to Cameo (CSM or CEA), so those won't be lost. Of course the bad news is the cost. Depending upon how many licenses of SA you have this won't might be a big upfront cost, but in following years you won't incur the SA maintenance. Wish I had better news for you, but your choices are build it from scratch or buy a license from Sodius. I can tell you from personal experience, that the Sodius tool does work.
  • Michael Vinarcik
    I'd suggest that it depends. I know Sodius does fine work...but I would argue that in some cases it's better to start from scratch (exporting/importing sections of a model and cleaning/validating as you go). A lot of these legacy models are non-awesome and would benefit from updating to modern practices/methods. I'd also suggest that getting into CSM should be data-focused...recreating diagrams is trivial if the data is correct.
  • Robert Vincent Sigillito

    In reply to Michael Vinarcik:

    Michael, I agree with you that many legacy models are less than "awesome", if not outright junk. BUT sometimes the customer wants it ported over so they can refer back to that legacy data and discontinue paying for an SA license. That said, the reality is often that the historical data will never be reviewed and this behavior is what I call "digital hoarding". I'm on my second port of SA data using Sodius and prior reviews of these SA models uncovered significant flaws in modeling methodology (it was used as a drawing tool by people whose qualification was they could spell "architecture") and require a complete re-engineering. Still, the customer requires that their historical data AND diagrams be ported, end of the discussion. After that, there isn't much the contractor can do except perform the work as directed.
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