Design of consistent scenarios for IT technologies in system creation based on multiple domain matrices

The effective management and planning of a company's IT technologies for system development is a prerequisite for data consistency, transparency, and enables the efficient configuration and creation of complex systems. The trending development of engineering technologies known as advanced systems engineering (ASE) leads to a nearly unmanageable complexity of potential software and IT solutions, a variety of interest groups and engineering domains to be integrated in decision processes, and innovative, difficult to understand process technologies. Especially small and medium enterprises have naturally grown IT conditions and limited resources to analyse and plan their IT landscapes. We propose a structured methodology that allows consistent planning of IT technologies used in ASE. It is a streamlined method and shall guide the practical application in industrial workshops. In its core, it uses a combination of multiple-domain-matrices and the scenario technique. Firstly, to cope with the complexity of decision-making, and secondly, to plan alternative scenarios. The scenario methodology was iteratively developed and tested in industrial cases of small, medium and big companies. The presented work introduces this new realm by giving a first approach to designing the landscape of new IT and process technologies and therefor bridges research and technology into direct industrial application.