Practitioner's guide for building effective complex enterprise architecture in digital transformation: An experience-based industry best practices summary

Abstract

Enterprise software architectures have profound influence on present day digital transformations in any complex software systems building and overall performance. Enterprise architectures also influence the software systems sustainability to induct design changes for changing business requirements. They provide high-level abstraction by representing structural and behavioral properties of software system and represents multiple views addressing the needs of diverse stakeholders of business organizations. Software architecture of a software application will be at the core in deciding the success or failure of any software system. In a typical enterprise software architecture, key design decisions that address the needs of diverse stakeholders are captured under various architectural headings and unfortunately, the usage of these terminologies have been context based leading to ambiguity. This paper attempts to explain a systematic approach in eliciting key architectural design considerations and various aspects to be considered in formulating Business Architecture, Application Architecture, Data Architecture and Technology Architecture which are key components of any Enterprise Architecture. Also, this paper unveils various types of services that are to be identified that they play in software architecture formulation.