Articles

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Towards a Visual Language Approach for Modeling Business Ecosystems

Enterprises develop, produce, and distribute their products and services nowadays in complex and increasingly digital business ecosystems consisting of business partners, suppliers, competitors, start-ups, public institutions, and costumers. These business ecosystems exhibit a high dynamic: new actors enter and leave the ecosystem continuously. Thus, for enterprise business and IT strategy the knowledge about and active design of the business ecosystems are gaining more relevance. Various stakeholders within the enterprise need to collaborate to achieve a holistic understanding of the ecosystem, all with different requirements towards the ecosystem model. As visualizations have proven to support stakeholders in fulfilling their ecosystem related tasks, the aim of this research project is the modeling and visualizing of business ecosystems addressing the identified challenges.

From Enterprise Architecture to Business Ecosystem Architecture: Stages and challenges for extending architectures beyond organizational boundaries

Today, Enterprises act in an increasingly interconnected world and in different kinds of collaborative networks. They are part of business ecosystems in which they interact with their customers, partners and competitors. The processes of analyzing and planning the intertwinement of business and IT architecture within enterprises has been successfully supported by enterprise architecture management (EAM) approaches. In this paper, we analyze four cases from different industries (health care, logistics, retail, and education) and argue that the intra-organizational concepts of enterprise architectures (EA) and EAM need to be extended to grasp the challenges of the enterprises’ interconnectedness. Beyond the known concepts of extended enterprise architecture and federated architectures, we define five stages of extended architectures. Additionally, we describe challenges and existing solutions, which are relevant for this extended perspective.

The Next Production Revolution: Implications for Governments and Business

This publication examines the opportunities and challenges, for business and government, associated with technologies bringing about the “next production revolution”. These include a variety of digital technologies (e.g. the Internet of Things and advanced robotics), industrial biotechnology, 3D printing, new materials and nanotechnology. Some of these technologies are already used in production, while others will be available in the near future. All are developing rapidly. As these technologies transform the production and the distribution of goods and services, they will have far-reaching consequences for productivity, skills, income distribution, well-being and the environment. The more that governments and firms understand how production could develop in the near future, the better placed they will be to address the risks and reap the benefits.

Enterprise architecture management and its role in corporate strategic management

A considerable number of organizations continually face difficulties bringing strategy to execution, and suffer from a lack of structure and transparency in corporate strategic management. Yet, enterprise architecture as a fundamental exercise to achieve a structured description of the enterprise and its relationships appears far from being adopted in the strategic management arena. To move the adoption process along, this paper develops a comprehensive business architecture framework that assimilates and extends prior research and applies the framework to selected scenarios in corporate strategic management.

Presenting a Theory-Based Model for IT Management Responsibilities

Enterprise architecture is all about the IT systems, the IT organization, and how they provide value to the business. Nonetheless, the complex relations within this trinity have previously been overlooked in literature. The herein proposed reference model for IT management responsibilities therefore aims at explaining how IT organizations and IT systems serve as value enablers to the business, thus clarifying the boundaries of IT management’s responsibilities. The model is based on extensive literature studies and has been tested in a series of empirical studies.