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An Architecture Principle Measurement Instrument Tested in Real-Life

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Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 378))

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Abstract

A high percentage of information system projects still fails due to poor implementation of requirements. Over the years, investigations by numerous scientists suggest that architecture principles are important in the successful implementation of those information systems requirements. However, these investigations are of a theoretical nature; until now, no validation in practice has taken place. Our research stresses this empirical validation: do architecture principles work in real-life situations? To find this evidence, we need an instrument to measure architecture principles, in order to establish the connection between principle and project success. The focus of this paper is such an architecture principle measurement instrument. We describe the results of a literature study, yielding both the definition and the characteristics of the architecture principle. Besides the measurement instrument, we describe the related measurement method, including the test in a real-life case. Based on the outcome of the case study, we extend the instrument with additional architecture principles characteristics and attributes, and we improve the measurement method.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    An information system is an system to collect, process, store, and distribute information and includes software, hardware, data, people, and procedures.

  2. 2.

    Definition is an exact statement of the meaning of a subject and description is a listing of all characteristics of a subject [46].

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Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the senior experts Saco Bekius (DTA, now M&I Partners), Martin van den Berg (Dutch Central Bank), Danny Greefhorst (ArchiXL), Paul Oude Luttighuis (Le Blanc Advies) and Raymond Slot (Hogeschool Utrecht) for reviewing (parts of) this paper.

We would like to thank Yvette Hoekstra and Henk van den Berg for participating in the research team of the case study and giving all kinds of comments on both the measurement instrument and the case study results. Secondly, we want to thank the Dutch Tax Agency, and Jelco Bosma specifically, for enabling the case study.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business and Economics, Maastricht University, Tongersestraat 53, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Michiel Borgers & Frank Harmsen

Authors
  1. Michiel Borgers
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  2. Frank Harmsen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michiel Borgers .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. INSTICC and Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal, Setúbal, Portugal

    Joaquim Filipe

  2. Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland

    Michał Śmiałek

  3. George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Alexander Brodsky

  4. MODESTE/ESEO, Angers, France

    Slimane Hammoudi

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 6 and 7.

Table 1. Most relevant publications related to defining and describing architecture principles [3].
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Table 2. Overview of architecture principle definitions by different authors [3].
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Table 3. Decomposition and consolidation of an architecture principle definition [3].
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Table 4. Characteristics of architecture principles [3].
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Table 5. Characteristics of architecture principle set [3].
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Table 6. Possible values for the attributes of the classification characteristic [4].
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Table 7. The 36 architecture principles used within the TDi case (translated from Dutch) [4].
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Borgers, M., Harmsen, F. (2020). An Architecture Principle Measurement Instrument Tested in Real-Life. In: Filipe, J., Śmiałek, M., Brodsky, A., Hammoudi, S. (eds) Enterprise Information Systems. ICEIS 2019. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 378. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40783-4_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40783-4_26

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