Investigating the Applicability of the Normalized Systems Theory on IT Infrastructure Systems

Abstract

The agile enterprise requires evolvability at all layers of the enterprise - business, application and infrastructure. IT infrastructure systems are at the heart of IT systems in general. Their evolution has a profound impact on applications and business capabilities. Normalized Systems Theory (NS) provides theorems to evaluate the evolvability of modular systems. As IT infrastructure systems can be represented by a modular structure, it is expected that NS can be used to study the evolvability of IT infrastructure systems. This paper demonstrates that NS can indeed be used to study the evolvability of IT Infrastructure systems. For this purpose, an artefact has been designed, made up of a 5-step method, to study the evolvability of a modular system representing an IT infrastructure system using NS. The artefact has been successfully applied to some IT infrastructure systems, but the method requires refinement and a more rigorous translation of the NS theorems into IT infrastructure equivalents is required. Although further research is required, the paper contributes to the growing number of domains on which NS can be applied.