A Conceptualization of IT Platform for the Needs of Enterprise IT Landscape Modeling

Abstract

An Information Technology (IT) platform is commonly perceived not only as an important part of the IT infrastructure of an organization, but also as an artifact enabling innovation and value creation by supporting the provision of various IT services. The concept of an IT platform is however quite broad and there seems to be a lack of common agreement what actually an IT platform is and how it should be described. This lack of consensus is detrimental to the development of IT Infrastructure modeling languages, which currently hardly ever support detailed modeling of an IT platform in all its variety. As a response, the aims of this paper are to: (1) analyze the way an IT platform is perceived in the literature as well as by currently existing IT infrastructure modeling languages, (2) conceptualize an IT platform by identifying its distinguishing features, and finally (3) to introduce an extended domain-specific modeling language for IT infrastructure (ITML) accounting for a more detailed conceptualization of an IT platform. We contribute a conceptualization in which (1) the platform's functionality and constraints are first class citizens, and (2) the idea of a platform stack, whereby the functionality and constraints on one type of IT platform (e.g., a hardware platform), serve as a foundation for another type of platform (e.g., an operating system in the case of a hardware platform).