Alignment of application architecture to business architecture is a central problem in the design, acquisition and implementation of information systems in current large-scale information-processing organizations. Current research in architecture alignment is either too strategic or too software implementation-oriented to be of use to the practicing information systems architect. This paper presents a framework to analyze the alignment problem and operationalizes this as an approach to application architecture design given a business context. We summarize guidelines for application architecture design and illustrate our approach and guidelines with an example.