Architectural Styles for Information Systems: An Organizational Perspective

Enterprise information systems such as ERP, Knowledge Management or e-business systems need to deploy information system architectures which match the organization of the enterprise within which they operate. This calls for system architectures which adopt models from research in organization theory. With this idea in mind, we offer a set of organization–oriented architectural styles for information systems. Our approach complements well proposals for multi-agent architectures which are becoming increasingly important for business information systems. In this paper, we adopt an e-business example to illustrate how to design an organizational architecture for a business-to-consumer application. The research is conducted in the context of a comprehensive information system development methodology called Tropos.