Correctly assessing the -ilities" requires more than marketing hype

Understanding key system qualities can better equip you to correctly assess the technologies you manage. Dot-coms and enterprise systems often use terms like scalability, reliability and availability to describe how well they meet current and future service-level expectations. These ilities characterize an IT solution´s architectural and engineering qualities. They collectively provide a vocabulary for discussing an IT solution´s performance potential amid ever-changing IT requirements. The paper considers the role that ilities play in the solution architecture. They generally fall into four categories: strategic, systemic, service and user.