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Business Cloudification – An Enterprise Architecture Perspective

Cloud computing is emerging as a promising enabler of some aspects of the ‘agile’ and ‘lean’ features that businesses need to display in today’s hyper-competitive and disruptive global economic ecosystem. However, it is increasingly obvious that there are essential prerequisites and caveats to cloudification that businesses need to be aware of in order to avoid pitfalls. This paper aims to present a novel, Enterprise Architecture-based approach towards analysing the cloudification endeavour, adopting a holistic paradigm that takes into account the mutual influences of the entities and artefacts involved, in the context of their life cycles. As shown in the paper, this approach enables a richer insight into the ‘readiness’ of a business considering embarking on a cloudification endeavour and therefore empowers management to evaluate consequences of- and take cognisant decisions on the cloudification extent, type, provider etc. based on prompt information of appropriate quality and deta

Beyond Business-IT Alignment – Digital Business Strategies as a Paradigmatic Shift: A Review and Research Agenda

Since the 1990s, business-IT alignment has been considered the appropriate organizational frame for business and IT strategies. Thereafter, with the rising importance of innovative digital technologies for performance and competitiveness, the concept of digital business strategies (DBS) emerged. The fusion of business and IT strategies is presumed to account for the inevitable transformations that digital technologies triggered. This paradigmatic shift poses new challenges to practitioners and researchers, as current assumptions regarding strategizing processes need to be questioned. This study sets out to provide a structured clarification of the current digital business strategies knowledge base. It provides a threefold contribution by: 1) structuring the research efforts on digital business strategies, 2) uncovering knowledge gaps and 3) developing an agenda for future research.

How Enterprise Architecture Maturity Enables Post-Merger IT Integration

While world-wide Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As) activity continues to accelerate, a substantial proportion of deals fails to yield the expected value. The inability to plan and implement post-merger integration of information technology contributes substantially to these failure rates. This paper advances the argument that a company’s pre-existing Enterprise Architecture decisively shapes the capability to implement post-merger IT integration and subsequently realize benefits from M&A. Our multiple-case study investigates three acquisition cases and develops an explanatory theory of how Enterprise Architecture maturity enables the implementation of distinct integration strategies. The results do not only enrich the academic literature on M&A, but also show the strategic value of Enterprise Architecture maturity.

Virtual Decoupling for IT/Business Alignment – Conceptual Foundations, Architecture Design and Implementation Example

IT/business alignment is one of the main topics of information systems research. If IT artifacts and business-related artifacts are coupled point-to-point, however, complex architectures become unmanageable over time. In computer science, concepts like the ANSI/SPARC three-level database architecture propose an architecture layer which decouples external views on data and the implementation view of data. In this paper, a similar approach for IT/business alignment is proposed. The proposed alignment architecture is populated by enterprise services as elementary artifacts. Enterprise services link software components and process activities. They are aggregated into applications and subsequently into domains for planning/design and communication purposes. Most design approaches for the construction of enterprise services, applications and domains are top-down, i. e. they decompose complex artifacts on a stepwise basis. As an alternative which takes into account coupling semantics, we propose a bottom-up approach which is demonstrated for the identification of domains. Our approach is evaluated using a telecommunications equipment case study.

Requisite variety and its implications for the control of complex systems

Recent work on the fundamental processes of regulation in biology (Ashby, 1956) has shown the importance of a certain quantitative relation called the law of requisite variety. After this relation had been found, we appreciated that it was related to a theorem in a world far removed from the biological—that of Shannon on the quantity of noise or error that could be removed through a correction-channel (Shannon and Weaver, 1949; theorem 10). In this paper I propose to show the relationship between the two theorems, and to indicate something of their implications for regulation, in the cybernetic sense, when the system to be regulated is extremely complex. Since the law of requisite variety uses concepts more primitive than those used by entropy, I will start by giving an account of that law.

Evaluating Enterprise Architecture Frameworks Using Essential Elements

Enterprise architecture (EA) frameworks offer principles, models, and guidance to help one develop an EA program. Due to EA’s flexible and abstract nature, there is a proliferation of EA frameworks in practice. Yet, comparison studies to make sense of them are far from satisfactory in that they lack a theoretical foundation for comparison criteria and do not meaningfully interpret the differences. In this paper, I propose a comparison approach using EA essential elements—the underlying key features of EA programs—to distinguish EA frameworks. Based on the extant literature, I identify eight elements, each with its own theoretical justification and empirical evidence. I illustrate how to use these elements to evaluate eight popular EA frameworks. The results show three ideal types of EA frameworks: technical, operational, and strategic EA. Each type has a different focus, set of assumptions, and historical context. The essential elements offer a more systematic way to evaluate EA frameworks. In addition, they shift attention from the maturity models often used in EA development to focus on particular EA elements being implemented by organizations.