What is Microsoft Solution Framework

The e-business models in today’s globalized business world demand ever-increasing flexibility, responsiveness, and agility of information technology (IT) solutions. It is compulsory for the IT group to provide higher levels of services at a lower cost for the business to compete and succeed. The reality to IT is that there is no choice other than to build more complex, flexible, scalable, extensible, innovative, and forward-thinking technical solutions, to satisfy the growing business needs. In large organizations like worldwide financial institutions, virtually thousands, if not millions, of IT applications and systems have been constructed or purchased to provide electronic services for external customers and internal employees in the past years, utilizing heterogeneous technologies and architectures to meet diverse functional requirements from different lines of business. In the banking industry, as an example, the business process generally contains different business sectors in consumer, commercial, small business, wealth management, and capital management. In particular, services are delivered to different channels such as automated teller machines (ATMs), Web browsers, interactive voice response, agent assistance, e-mails, mobile devices, and so on. To effectively manage the architecture assets and rationalize the architecture designs in such a diverse environment, a multi-disciplinary engineering approach is of crucial importance to abstract concerns, divide responsibilities, mitigate risks, encapsulate the complexity, reverse-engineer existing applications, identify reengineering opportunities, and conduct objective technology assessments, which leads to in-depth technical recommendations and rationalization action plans.