Assessing systems architecture: an exploratory framework

Competitive forces are pushing companies to leverage value from their system architecting competency that supports long-term growth. A system's architecture profoundly influences the cost and success of a system throughout the entire lifecycle and the business processes it supports. Assessment results can be used to drive changes in the architecture that would increase project success, alignment of business goals, stakeholder acceptance, decrease costs throughout the entire lifecycle, and enhance system performance and quality. Most relevant architecture assessment methods focus on system attributes. The key to success in this approach is to understand which system attributes should be addressed and what impact they have on architecture. The existing literature does not provide a comprehensive list of these attributes. This research identifies a set of relevant system architecture attributes in a classification framework aligned to business objectives that can be used for architecture assessment.