Software development is a major investment for any company. To maximize the return, the process of software development needs to be governed strategically. Such governance can be achieved only if IT and business decision-makers collaborate in harmony. The attempts to bridge the gap between IT and business have been referred to as business-IT alignment.
In software development, the software architecture has been considered an effective means of communication between business and IT stakeholders. Therefore, recent approaches to software development have addressed business-IT alignment on this level by aligning software architecture to various business models, such as concept and process models. However, conceptual and process alignment concerns have always been addressed separately, for example “domain-driven design” and “process-centric architecture” approaches which strongly differ in this regard. While conceptual alignment focuses on the ontological conformance between software architecture and business models, process alignment focuses on functional granularity conformance. We strongly argue that the alignment of both aspects is necessary for the sustainability of software development.
To address the aformentioned issues, this research project aims to develop an approach to business-IT alignment which incorporates business concept and process modeling techniques into software architecture activities. This field opens up various research possibilities including but not limited to
- Business modeling approach that integrates both business concept and process views
- Deriving microservices architecture from the resulting business models
- Business-model-based approach to maintaining and managing microservices
- Business-model-based approach to migrating to microservices
This research was initiated and funded through our industrial cooperation with SUPR by Wirecard Technologies GmbH, a major marketplace provider based in Germany.
