Architecture & design for application agility

The extremely dynamic, competitive, and global business environment has dramatically increased the rate of change in businesses resulting in mergers and acquisitions, building of alliances, increased pace of product and service development, and marketing innovation. To succeed in this hyper competitive environment corporations are increasingly focusing on design, architecture, optimization, and management of their intra and inter organizational business processes. They are also looking for capabilities to dynamically monitor, change, integrate and fine tune interand intra-organizational processes in a very short period of time without significant efforts and involvement of their IT staff. Unfortunately, in this environment IT is often looked upon more as a road block than the enabler of change. One of the major reasons for this is the slow pace and high cost of integrating and changing IT applications. These problems are inherently rooted in the way IT applications are architected and designed. Advances in component based development (CBD), Web Services technologies, and the concepts like Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) are significantly impacting the whole paradigm of application development. These technologies and concepts have significantly improved the interoperability at hardware, operating system, development language, and data levels. This allows radically different approaches and business models to be used for application architecture, design, and development. Started as a cost effective approach for integrating intra-firm and inter-firm applications, SOA is increasingly becoming an approach for architecting and developing applications using many vendor provided services. According to Gartner, by 2008, 80% of software development projects will be based on service-oriented architectures. Additionally, existing legacy applications and packaged applications are being re-factored and delivered as service-oriented business applications. Many major corporations are in the midst of implementing significant initiatives to re-architect their IT through service centric computing to help meet fast changing business requirements. This is expected to significantly change the application development approach from either custom application development or package implementation (including ERP) to more of a solution assembly approach. In this environment the central role of in-house IT is to be very closely aligned to business, help shape the corporate strategies and relationship with customers and suppliers, improve productivity through automation and control of operation and production environment using real time information, and determine system requirements based on business strategy. In spite of the significant interest in the business community in architecting and designing applications for agility, the processes and methodologies for designing, architecting and developing such applications are in their infancy. Numerous interesting research issues related to application agility definitions, business value of agility, agility measurement, agile application development approaches, design models, project team organization, communication within and across project teams, and governance need to be addressed. Many additional issues related to organizational implementation, adoption, impact of these changes on IT organization and IT education need to be studied. H. Jain Sheldon B. Lubar School of Business, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI 53201, USA e-mail: jain@uwm.edu