Categorizing the enterprise technology landscape
To better understand and manage the IT assets in the enterprise, a well-defined classification is required. There are many different ways to categorize applications; however, most organizations across industries follow Gartner’s pace layered architecture to categorize their applications. We will be following Gartner’s pace layered architecture as our application categorization framework in this book as well. A typical enterprise’s application landscape consists of three different types of applications, as represented by Gartner’s pace layered architecture approach, as shown here:
Figure 2.1 – Gartner’s pace layered architecture and application distribution
As you can see, along with innovative next-generation applications under Systems of Innovation, there are a lot more applications under the Systems of Record (core business apps) and Systems of Differentiation...