Democratization of Corporate IT using IS Architecture Representation Framework (ISARF)

Abstract

Democratization, digital and data transformation, the need for responsible access to data and analytics resources, and the emergence of cloud computing are creating the need for understanding architectural aspects of IT for technical and business users. The combination of these trends, resulting in software-defined hardware, has blurred the line between software and hardware for IT developers. Similarly, the plug & play nature of serverless computing has allowed business users to manage their own cloud deployments. In spite of the numerous benefits, the combination of these new trends has created some challenges for IT management, one of which is to make the enterprise architecture more robust, accessible, and understandable. We, utilizing the representation theory and the theory of digital object, propose an IS architecture representation framework (ISARF) as a way to explain complex IT architectural concepts to software developers, business users, and executives. We posit that this framework can be utilized for the growing need for democratization of IT.