Functional Service Domain Architecture Management: Building the Foundation for Situational Method Engineering

Functional service domains are logical design artifacts that are intended to achieve better business/IT alignment. Their widespread utilization clearly indicates their perceived usefulness in managing the complexity of aligning business structures with IT structures. However, a common understanding of functional service domains and the associated principles that govern their design and evolution is still missing. So far, the literature provides only little guidance in closing this gap. This article contributes to the foundations that allow for the design of a situational method for functional service domain architecture management. Reviewing current literature, a framework is proposed that supports the identification of functional service domain architecture management patterns. Based on a better understanding of functional domain architecture management approaches, situational method engineering for functional domains can be applied by identifying context types and goal vectors, designing fragments, and associating successfully adopted method fragments with specific situations. The validity of the proposed framework is tested by five case studies.