Service Migration in an Enterprise System Architecture

This paper briefly reviews the state of enterprise system architecting (ESA) and concludes that assumptions of incremental technical evolution (overlaid by selective organizational changes such as mergers or business growth/failure) are a driving force for ESA design. The paper proposes that ESAs evolve through a punctuated view of development - that new capabilities arise because of environmental, not primarily technical, drivers. It proposes a new model for ESA capability delivery - the service migration model - that no longer locates and delivers data to a processing site, but rather, as data sets reach the hundreds of gigabytes to the terabyte range, delivers services to the data set sites. It discusses the issues and implications for management decisions regarding ESA choices.