Component Matching Approach in Linking Business and Application Architecture

TL;DR

This paper presents an extension of a formal approach using category theory and rCOS to automate the matching of business and application components, facilitating better alignment of IT and business architectures.

Contribution

It introduces an automated component matching process based on formal models, advancing previous manual methods for linking business and application architectures.

Findings

Proposes a formal framework for component matching

Lays groundwork for a supporting tool

Extends previous manual matching approach

Abstract

The development of an IT strategy and ensuring that it is the best possible one for business is a key problem many organizations face. This problem is that of linking business architecture to IT architecture in general and application architecture specifically. In our earlier work we proposed Category theory as the formal language to unify the business and IT worlds with the ability to represent the concepts and relations between the two in a unified way. We used rCOS as the underlying model for the specification of interfaces, contracts, and components. The concept of pseudo-category was then utilized to represent the business and application architecture specifications and the relationships contained within. The linkages between them now can be established using the matching of the business component contracts with the application component contracts. However the matching was based on manual process and in this paper we extend the work by considering automated component matching process. The ground work for a tool to support the matching process is laid out in this paper.