ABSTRACT
Business goals come in many forms and at many levels
of abstraction, and the stakeholders of the system are
usually not accustomed to making the goals explicit.
Business goals have a tendency to get blurred between
the people who can articulate them and the technical peo-
ple who implement them. Yet, technical decisions have a
profound impact on the achievement of the business goals.
For example, a business goal might be to increase market
share. Means by which this can be achieved include
increasing quality, supporting multiple platforms, and sup-
porting multiple languages. If the means for achieving a
particular business goal have not been specified, then the
technical team will make the decision on how to achieve
that particular goal. Consequently, it is useful during the
analysis of the architecture to verify that all of the business
goals and the decisions about how to achieve them are
known to the technical people who are designing the archi-
tecture. Stakeholder involvement in the methods for per-
forming architectural analysis is one of the means to
achieve this awareness. We pursue this theme further
when we discuss methods for performing architectural
analysis.
