Business componentization: A guidance to application service design

Abstract

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 sustain because business processes are usually under continuous changes. In this paper, business componentization is proposed to address this challenge. An enterprise can be described as a set of business components with business services as their 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 a tightness evaluation of business processes, organizations, and IT systems. This paper presents a heuristic algorithm, and an aggregated clustering algorithm, for developing well-defined business component maps.