Comparison between information system architectures

There are different types of information system architectures, but there has not been a structural comparison between the different types. I develop in this paper a structured approach to assess the three main Information System architectures, Enterprise Resource Planning, Service-Oriented Architecture and Multi Agent Systems, based on a structured approach. Furthermore, I provide in this paper an extensive analysis of the key characteristics of the three main IS architectures. In this paper, I develop a systematic and structured approach to pair wise compare and assess these key characteristics of the main architectures based on the IS development framework as developed by Zachman. The aim of this paper are twofold, first, to develop a framework which is suitable for comparing IS architectures and second, comparing the three architectures. The framework I developed is based on the Zachman framework and the views of the original framework are grouped together in due to the complexity of comparing the original framework for the three architectures, this resulted in a new 6x1 framework. The results of the comparison show that there are several key difference between the architectures in the areas of what kind of data is stored, the ability to keep working with legacy systems, the amount of complexity and uncertainty in which these architectures can operate and how the network which corresponds with these architectures is arranged.