Bridging organizational structure and information system architecture through process

Abstract

Because the architecture of an enterprise information system determines relations of its individual parts with its surrounding environment, an effective use of an information system (IS) requires, apart from other things, its painless integration into the enterprise management system. The IS architecture can be seen by different angles. The focus of this paper is in particular on the application architecture of an IS. The reason for analyzing organizational structure modeling approaches and IS architecture is to eliminate common semantic gaps between the languages used by IS users and designers. The architectural design of enterprise IS might be tightly interconnected with enterprise organizational architecture. However, in reality, architectural models of enterprise IS are not fairly understandable for users. For both of these architectural models the orientation on processes often is a joint base. Thus, process approach can prospectively bridge existing gaps between enterprise organizational models and IS architectures. In coherence with that goal the paper presents methodological aspects of how cross-organizational process support can be effectively used for designing the first stage of information system. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.