Continuous business engineering: towards aligned evolution of business strategy and software architecture

A high percentage of today’s businesses are highly depending on their IT-infrastructure in order to preserve their competitiveness in a global market. In this context, it is of decisive economic and strategic importance to be able to quickly adapt software systems to changes. Alignment of IT-infrastructure with business strategy has become a core issue. The approach of Continuous Business Engineering (CBE) contributes to this area by addressing the joint evolution of business strategy and software architecture. CBE aims at integrating forward-development on business strategy level and engineering processes on software architecture level. We consider this task as a continuously ongoing process dedicated to ensure integrated evolution. In a simplified picture, CBE can be described as defining correspondences between a model of the business strategy and a model of the software architecture. This paper describes three approaches for linking these models based on different degrees of coupling: (a) describing the business strategy based on a balanced scorecard and linking the architecture model via indicators, (b) combining the balanced scorecard approach with enterprise ontologies, and (c) integration of business strategy and software architecture in a joint enterprise model.