Architectural Requirements of Commercial Products

Information architectures only become relevant to most enterprises when they instance in commercially supported products. The mapping of technical appropriateness to commercial appropriateness is not straightforward; it involves a number factors from a larger perspective that act as architectural constraints, often resulting in unintuitive decisions. This contribution reviews those factors. It extends results from a large joint U. S./European precompetitive activity among major information infrastructure suppliers and a recent re-examination. Any such review which relies on specific products as examples is likely to become dated, so in the interest of making these insights more longer-lived, we’ll be more general than specific with regard to products.