ARIS - IAF: Differentiating of concerns between the IS/IT and Technology infrastructure aspect areas

I notice in many situations that physical hardware infrastructure artifacts are mixed with and the IS/IT aspect architecture views. I agree with the need in some situations where there is an interest to know the actual instance of the infrastructure such as a server. But for large architecture overview models, mixing aspect areas is not a good idea as it posses governance issues and overkill of information with too many objects scattered on the model.

This is similar to differentiating the aspects of IS/IT and infrastructure in IAF.

In IS/IT architecture overview model (IAF’s IS/IT logical and physical components), architects are more interested in interactions between various IS/IT components and not the infrastructure which supports it. Usually, the lead IT/Solution architect will be the owner of this view.

A technology infrastructure topology model captures the TI component’s interactions and where they are located. The infrastructure folks would be the governor of this view.

There should be a cross reference between the 2 aspect areas, to capture the links between an application and infrastructure supporting them. Use of contracts is very critical to understand dependencies.

I find that this solution of having an aspect area centric modeling by the differentiating the aspect concerns eases the clustering of models and also solving the tricky issue of model governance.

Hope I made sense.