Information System Architectures: Representation, Planning and Evaluation

André Vasconcelos, Pedro Sousa, José Tribolet

In recent years organizations have been faced with increasingly demanding business environments - pushed by factors like market globalization, need for product and service innovation and product life cycle reduction - and with new information technologies changes and opportunities- such as the Component-off-the-shelf paradigm, the telecommunications improvement or the Enterprise Systems off-the-shelf modules availability - all of which impose a continuous redraw and reorganization of business strategies and processes.

Nowadays, Information Technology makes possible high-speed, efficient and low cost access to the enterprise information, providing the means for business processes automation and improvement. In spite of these important technological progresses, information systems that support business, do not usually answer efficiently enough to the continuous demands that organizations are faced with, causing non-alignment between business and information technologies (IT) and therefore reducing organization competitive abilities.

This article discusses the vital role that the definition of an Information System Architecture (ISA) has in the development of Enterprise Information Systems that are capable of staying fully aligned with organization strategy and business needs. In this article the authors propose a restricted collection of founding and basis operations, which will provide the conceptual paradigm and tools for proper ISA handling. These tools are then used in order to represent, plan and evaluate an ISA of a Financial Group.

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