Towards an Understanding of Practice

Abstract

This chapter casts the literature observations against a Maturity of IT-Business Alignment Assessment Tool developed by Wognum and Ip-Shing making it possible to test the completeness of the literature. Some surprising structural features emerge suggesting that observations may be more perspective dependent than discrete. While most of the Key Area (KA) data sets could be internally normalized, the tool allowed additional cross data set normalizations. Although originally classified into a specific KA it seemed that some observations contain aspects of multiple KAs. This raised questions about the nature of observations in general and occasionally suggested the generation of additional observations. What is revealed is a body of knowledge that has a lot to say about what good architecture practice should look like. But, has very little advice to give about how to achieve that end. The chapter concludes with an extensive although abbreviated list of literature derived observations. To our knowledge no similarly derived list of observations has ever been published.