Building Software Solutions in an Urbanized Information System: The 5+1 Software Architecture Model

The concept of Information Systems urbanization has been proposed since the late 90's in order to help organizations building agile Information Systems. Nevertheless, despite the advantages of this concept, it remains too descriptive and presents many weaknesses. In particular, there is a lack of useful architecture models dedicated to defining software solutions compliant with Information Systems urbanization principles and rules. Moreover, well-known software architecture models don’t provide sufficient resources to address the requirements and constraints of urbanized Information Systems. In this paper, we draw on the “information city” framework to propose a model of software architecture – called the 5+1 Software Architecture Model -which helps organizations building urbanized software solutions. This framework improves the well-established software architecture models and allows the integration of new architectural paradigms.