How Clustering Enterprise Architectures helps to Design Service Oriented Architectures

The main target of IT architects being responsible for complex and heterogeneous IT architectures is to align IT to business needs at the lowest costs possible. A recent approach to this issue is service oriented architectures (SOA). In order to design and deploy a SOA methodological and technological aspects have to be taken into account. This contribution focuses on methodological aspects like how to find appropriate service domains and an appropriate granularity of the services. Therefore existing business processes, organizational structures and their linkage with the different elements of an organization´s IT landscape were analyzed. The paper presents a software system for automatically analyzing enterprise architectures incorporating clustering algorithms developed for analyzing community structures in a network oriented fashion. It will be shown, how clustering and visualization of enterprise architecture networks improve the understanding of underlying structures of enterprise architectures and thus lead to a better design of SOA