University of Twente, Centre for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT)
Abstract
In this paper we view IT architecture as the structures present in the entire information technology support used by an organization. Research into IT architecture either is of a strategic nature, yielding no operational guidelines for the practicing IT-architect, or it is part of software engineering, yielding no guidelines that related software architecture to the business environment. In this paper we report on a detailed case study of an operational IT architecture process, in which we investigated the relationship between IT architecture and business context. We analyze this process in terms of a conceptual framework for IT architecture presented earlier. The major findings are that in this case study there is a close relationship between IT architecture and the structure of the IT department, which makes IT architecture design also a problem of organizational design; that application architecture is designed by aligning applications to the business process structure; and that IT infrastructure architecture is designed by aligning it to technological trends rather than to business goals and problems. This paper reports about a single case study done in a series of case studies. We discuss the generalizability of the findings from this case study, and discuss topics for further research
