IT Systems for the Digital Enterprise

Modern digital enterprises operate in a dynamic environment where the business objectives, underlying technologies, and expectations from the end-users change over the time. Therefore, developing agile and adaptive IT systems is a critical need for most of the large business-critical enterprises. However, it is observed that the traditional IT system development approaches are not capable of ensuring all desired characteristics. This chapter discusses a set of established concepts and techniques that collectively help to achieve the desired agility and adaptiveness. The chapter reflects on the core concept of model-driven engineering for agility, technology independence, and retargetability; focuses on component abstraction to introduce divide-and-concur and separation of concerns; and proposes the use of variability and the concept of productline for developing configurable and extensible IT system.