Architecturing large integrated complex information systems: an application to healthcare

The global enterprise-wide approaches help organizations to model and understand the enterprise key components and their relationships and manage the organizations’ transformations and change. However, many of these approaches lack of insights into how to manage complexities related to the multitude of applications developed in silos such as the various systems in health organizations that were designed independently from each other. This paper contributes to the solutions addressing this issue by proposing a methodology and tools to create foundations based on key components to help develop the information architecture at the heart of the enterprise architecture that can guarantee the evolution of the organization. These core components are a set of reusable Field Actions representing the non-contextual persistent information, a common canonical Corporate Conceptual Data Model capturing all the vital data in the organization, and Views or sub-schema of this global data model that represent information for different stakeholders in the organization. To show the effectiveness of the proposed approach and to gain more insights into its practical value, the architecturing approach is applied in the healthcare domain to create the information architecture and the enterprise architecture for the Quebec healthcare network.