ABSTRACT
Having discussed the business and organization aspects of e-business in the two preceding chapters, we now focus our attention on the architecture aspect. Architectures are blueprints for e-business information systems, i.e., for the automated systems that support the business interactions as discussed in the preceding chapter. In other words, architectures are designs of the structures of e-business systems – not so different from architectures in the building world where they are designs of the structure of houses or office buildings. In e-business, architectures form the interface between the non-IT aspects (the B and O aspects of the BOAT framework as discussed in the previous chapters) and the IT-aspects of e-business (the T aspect of BOAT, which we discuss in the next chapter).
