Towards a Knowledge Management-Based Framework for Aligning Enterprise and Software Architecture

Continuous changes in organizational requirements, including the architecturally significant ones, have drawn researchers' attentions to the importance of architecture evolution process. Considering the widespread effect of structural design decisions, the consistency with previously designed architectural structures should thus be continuously preserved throughout the evolution process. Evolving Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Software Architecture (SA), as a kind of architectural structure, is thus important. One of the approaches for managing this process is managing the evolution process knowledge. The knowledge that has been used for designing the architecture is as valuable as the designed architecture itself because the architecture would be destroyed if it is updated without considering the knowledge that was used (or created) during the design process. On the other hand, one of the reasons for which updating the architecture is important is the need for aligning SA and EA. Although the idea of using Knowledge Management (KM) process for evolving architecture has somehow been addressed, researchers have sporadically studied the applicability of using KM techniques for addressing the alignment issues. In this research, a framework is proposed for aligning the SA and EA based on KM process. Architectural designers can use this framework for aligning the architectures, and researchers can use it for proposing new alignment methods.