Business Componentization: A Principle for Enterprise Architecture Design

Aligning IT with business both at the strategic level and at the operation and management level is a challenge in enterprise architecture design. A simplistic approach of linking IT systems with business processes would not work because business processes are usually under continuous changes. Business componentization is proposed to address the challenge. An enterprise can be described as a set of business components with business services as the interaction interfaces. This paper discusses how business components can help the design of enterprise architecture. Also, we propose an interactive quantitative approach for business componentization. A business component is clustered from business activities based on tightness evaluation of business processes, organizations, and IT systems. This paper presents two heuristic algorithms, a fuzzy clustering algorithm and an aggregated clustering algorithm, which help form well-defined business component maps.

By: Chunhua Tian; Wei Ding; Rong Zeng Cao; Juhnyoung Lee

Published in: RC24127 in 2006

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