Open Issues on Information System Architecture Research Domain: The Vision

Currently organizations, pushed by several business and technological changes, are more concern about Information systems (IS) than ever. Though organizations usually still face each IS as a separately technological issue with slight relations with business domain. This paper discusses the importance of the Information System Architecture (ISA) as the tool for ensuring a global view on IS and for explicitly assessing alignment between technology and business processes and strategies. In this paper, considering the numerous topics, technologies and buzzwords surrounding ISA domain, we identify the major ISA open issues, namely: ISA Modelling, ISA Methodology, ISA Evaluation, IS Architectural Styles and Patterns, and IS/Business Alignment. We also present our advances in addressing some of these issues, by proposing an approach for ISA evaluation and IS/Business Alignment measure. This approach is supported on an ISA modelling framework and provides several indicators and measures for ISA evaluation. This approach is applied to an IS health care project evaluation.