Capabilities and Features: Linking Business and Application Architectures - I

Many organizations now perceive the importance of linking business architecture to information architecture, [1]. Without this linkage, it is difficult to manage the changes needed by the business and maximize the benefits from the information technology (IT) investments. Linking the two domains require that we define the two architectures using a "common language". The information architecture domain has developed tools and processes to define and represent the architecture, and use it to build the related processes and services. The business architecture domain, however, lacks such processes and tools and/or have not matured enough to be useful for linking of the two. In this paper we address several questions dealing with the linking of the business and the information/application architectures. Specifically, how do we define business architecture (useful for linking)? What level of details we need to represent? What view of the information architecture we should use for linking? How do we represent both these architectures and what "language" should we use? We propose the use Category theory related constructs and notions to represent both the business and information architecture [2]. The work reported here is primarily the current status of research in the area of business architecture,application architecture and linking these two.