Understanding the Concept of Architecture in the IT Jungle

Over time, we have all heard software vendors, analysts, consultants, and media talk about architectures. They use terms like enterprise architecture, software architecture, service-oriented architecture (SOA), event-driven architecture (EDA), and enterprise services architectures.

Is IT like the art world, where there are movements and styles, with leaders who set radical new trends for others to follow? Or are all these architectures related to each other? Why is it all so confusing?

The chief reason for confusion is that IT people have been using the concept of architecture to describe two different things: architecture for the software itself and the architecture for the corporation. This is like confusing the architecture of buildings and urban planning for the design of cities.

The first refers to the way you build software components, the techniques you use to split functionalities and the technologies for deployment. An SOA or EDA absolutely belongs in this category. In an SOA or EDA, you are redefining the building, re-building or deployment of software.

From an enterprise architecture point of view, the focus is on the definition of the core business processes and then the selection of software components that fulfill these processes and the supporting hardware infrastructure. This enterprise architecture has a broader charter than an SOA and is closer to the example of urban planning for a city. However, the need to reconfigure business processes and their supporting software components requires software to be built using an agile and flexible architecture style like SOA and/or EDA. This is much like the symbiotic relationship between the architecture of buildings and overall city planning.

What happens when a company reconfigures a business process and decides to outsource a portion (e.g. manufacturing) to a partner? Is this still part of the enterprise architecture? In the EDI and B2B world, this is still the case; but as companies do this more frequently, it becomes more complex. And as corporations enter into a true network of partnerships, walls between them become soft. In these cases, the enterprise architecture needs to evolve into “network architecture.” If enterprise architecture is like city planning, think of network architecture as regional planning—how different cities connect and trade with one another. 

Will this “network architecture” impact software architecture, i.e. the way we build and deploy software? Absolutely. That’s why Infor is building software components using both styles, namely a service-oriented style and an event-driven style. By adding the event-driven style to the software, Infor components can be deployed in both enterprise and network architectures.

Posted by Massimo Capoccia, Director Product Management, Technology