Issues and Concerns for an eBusiness Architect

As we have seen, there are numerous stakeholder interests to consider in designing an eBusiness solution. It is often helpful to think of these issues in terms of a list of key issues or questions that the architect must address.
An e-business plan should incorporate the following design issues:

1. Customer focus
2. Continual creation of value
3. Transform business process where possible to digital form
4. Decentralize management and centralize coordination
5. Technical infrastructure and architecture
6. Integrate and plan for growth and change

People use information design and structure as primary factors in assessing the credibility of web sites.

1. Information architecture and usability both contribute to user satisfaction
2. Quality of content is a prerequisite for attracting and retaining users / customers
3. What is the link to strategy ?

Information architecture: structural design of the information space to facilitate understanding

• Information Architecture
  1. The combination of organization, labelling and navigation schemes within an information system
  2. The structural design of an information space to facilitate task completion and intuitive access to content
  3. The art and science of structuring and classifying web sites, to help people find and manage information
  
  Information Architecture provides the connection between the big picture
  1. reduced development time, reduced maintenance cost, increase in visitors, increase in visitor time spent on site, improved actual and perceived usability, reduced time to accomplish tasks, increased sales and better alignment with the underlying business
  2. helps make sure that business needs and user needs are met
  3. Improve flow on site (site reflects user's mental model)
     Search Engine Opimisation (SEO)
     Integration to offline communications

These questions span multiple facets of the business, and should include the issues described in the table below.
The purpose of the eBusiness solution is by far the most important, but quite often the most overlooked. If it is not clear what the design should achieve, then there is no way to measure its success.
Remember that the purpose, is the foundation for all other questions.

The role of the architect is made more complex by the fact that these issues interact with each other. In many ways, managing these multiple priorities is a balancing act. Let us look at a simple example. If the volume projections for the system indicate that a large system must be constructed to handle significant traffic, then a large portion of the allocated financial budget must be set aside for that development. This may reduce the amount of funds available elsewhere in the budget, for example, funds allocated for management information. Of the issues discussed in this module, there are two key issues/questions are most likely to derail the eBusiness plan if you do not address them:

1. Does the design achieve its purpose?
2. Is the impact of its introduction understood and accepted by the enterprise as a whole?

In considering key concerns and issues, those most likely to cause the success or failure of the project should be addressed first.
In the next lesson, we will define the quality factors that the architect must consider. Click the Exercise link below to complete an exercise on the key issues and concerns of stakeholders. Issues Concerns Exercise