WOMTA

The support of operational processes through information- and communication-technologies keeps gaining importance in small- and medium-sized enterprises. In particular, the business application-systems (for example ERP, CRM) take up a central role as part of the ICT-spectrum. Driven by the continuously increasing competition- and cost-pressures, SMEs are dependent both on improving the process efficiency, for example by an increased degree of automation, as well as on increasing the process efficiency, for example through the development of digital distribution channels. Therefore companies need to determine the right IT-configuration for their organization.

This applies against the background of limited technical and temporal resources, especially for SMEs. The orientation of the application-architecture on the organization - and thus the process-architecture - will be a critically competitive task. To what extent the application-architecture can be adapted to the process-architecture largely depends on the underlying technology-architecture. The term technology-architecture summarizes all information- and communication-technologies, which are necessary to enable a process support through operational application systems.

The challenges of the alignment between technology- and application-architecture continue to exacerbate by the increasing importance of the topic Cloud Computing at SMEs. With cloud computing in particular IT-services can be designed demand-oriented. It is possible to meet outsourcing-decisions both on infrastructure layer, on application-and system-level and on business-process-level, in order to realize a simple external provision of IT services. The challenge for SMEs remains in determining their technology-architecture, as it has to match the demands of services from the cloud.