Modeling Services in Information Systems Architectures

Twenty years ago, Zachman proposed a framework – the Information Systems Architecture – that was certainly one of the main contributions to the Enterprise Architecture research area.

More recently, the concept of service was proposed and largely adopted, thus introducing another but fundamental perspective on how organizations not only operate internally but also relate with stakeholders.

In this paper we propose an extension to the Zachman framework that incorporates the concept of service.

The concept of service has been used for long in the economic and business context and more recently in the information system field. Simply stated, a service generally involves a need by one of the parts, the consumer, which is accomplished by the other part, the provider. A part could be a person, a system or an organization.