Agnostic informatics system of systems: The open ISoS services framework

Abstract

The upward integration endeavor is making informatics systems (I-systems) increasingly complex. The modeling techniques, methodologies, development strategies, deployment and execution environment, maintenance and evolution, and governance, to mention just a few aspects are making the resulted (un)integrated informatics technology system a vendor lock-in landscape. The relation between informatics science and engineering and the organization’s business or control processes automation, or services provisioning and adaptation, has demonstrated to be difficult to converge to a common understanding of clear computational responsibility borders. Existing approaches and standards fail to be complete with respect to establishing a landscape of informatics technology under vendor agnostic model (lock-in free). In this context, this paper extends previous research by proposing an organization´s level modularity framework aiming at formally identifying an agnostic, and open informatics system of systems (ISoS). A definition of its components is provided, and a validation case study is discussed.