Architectural Considerations for the System Landscape of the Digital Transformation

Since the advent of the World Wide Web the latest, there is a growing adoption of digital media for different purposes. It started with mere consumption through information and entertainment services, and expanded to the engagement of users with service providers in commercial and governmental affairs. As a consequence, services are extended into different directions: the communication channels used by clients, the improvement of services by including information on users and usage contexts, up to the goods or services in themselves that are being delivered. To this end, established processes, even ones at the core of a company’s value adding chain, have to be thought over, optimized, or even restructured. The importance of these kind of adaptations for current enterprises led to the coining of the term digitalization or digital transformation for them. Since systems for the support of digitalized processes consist of many products and services that are assembled or coordinated, a consideration of their overall system architecture is required. In face of ready-to-use solutions that are available for specific functionality, and also of the availability of larger ecosystems that enable digitalized processes, often the architecture is dictated by the components that are available in practice. Architectural considerations that start with requirements and constraints instead have to be applied in order to achieve the engineering quality of other software solutions, and to meet non-functional requirements like maintainability. The contribution of this paper is a first step into that direction. It starts with an analysis of typical functional requirements of systems for the support of digitalized processes. From these, it presents a first approach to an integrated architecture for digitalized systems, and it maps requirements to common software components and services that typically implement parts of the architecture. Keywords—Digitization; Digitalization; Digital transformation; Software architecture; Systems architecture; Solution architecture; Enterprise architecture.