Ch. 6 Reflections

In chapter 6 the author talks about the architecture of IS systems in a business and how the business strategy must align itself with the architecture and infrastructure for the company's IS system to be successful. Again this ties back into the authors first notion that the business, organizational, and IS strategy must be aligned. In looking at the different IT architectures companies can choose from to align their business strategy with, there is a growing debate on whether to use service-oriented architecture (SOA) or web-oriented architecture (WOA). I found this article on a ZDNet Blog by Joe McKendrick. In the article McKendrick talks about how WOA seems to be winning out over SOA because of its bottom-up mentality. Meaning that because WOA has so much possibility to start small and to be able to expand into a much larger system thus growing with the company. It is a interesting take and I am sure it will be the clear winner for now until the next big IT architecture breakthrough comes along.