Florian Matthes Archives

Collaborative Evolution of Enterprise Architecture Models

Enterprise Architecture (EA) management seeks to align business and IT while realizing cost saving potentials, improving availability and fault tolerance, and increasing flexibility of an organization. Regarding these objectives, decision makers need to be supported with solid and relevant models about the organization’s architecture to guide the future development of the EA. In practice, many EA initiatives struggle with inflexible models not meeting the information demand of stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a solution that empowers stakeholders to reveal their information demand collaboratively to facilitate EA models that evolve with changing information demands at runtime. We present core concepts of our approach and insights of an implementation thereof as foundation to achieve our long-term goal of evolving EA models. In our implementation we extend a collaboration platform with capabilities to monitor the actual information demand and to maintain the EA model referring to this demand at runtime. Indexed as A Tool for Collaborative Evolution of Enterprise Architecture Models at Runtime.

A Viable System Perspective on Enterprise Architecture Management

A number of approaches towards Enterprise Architecture (EA) management is proposed in literature, differing in the underlying understanding of the EA as well as in the description of the function for performing EA management. These plurality of methods and models should be interpreted as an indicator of the low maturity of the research area. In contrast, some researchers see it as inevitable consequence of the diversity of the enterprises under consideration. Staying to this interpretation, we approach the topic of EA management from a cybernetic point of view. Thereby, we elicit constituents, which should be considered in every EA management function based on a viable system perspective on the topic. From this perspective, we further revisit selected EA management approaches and show to which extent they allude to the viable system nature of the EA.

Business Capability Maps: Current Practices and Use Cases for Enterprise Architecture Management

This paper provides a state-of-the-art report on the usage of business capability maps in enterprise architecture management. We conducted expert interviews with 25 organizations to reveal the benefits and challenges of capability-based enterprise architecture management and evaluated 14 use cases on the feasibility and benefit of using business capability maps in practice. The results reveal increasing interest and acceptance of the approach in practice and among support organizations.

State-of-the-practice in analyzing enterprises’ business ecosystems

Business ecosystems are gaining more relevance both in research and in practice. The analysis of business ecosystems is thereby a data intense process. To better understand the current state-of-the-practice within enterprises addressing the analysis of business ecosystem we conducted an online survey asking participants about their division of labor, collection, documentation and processing of business ecosystem related data. 52 experts from mainly German based companies completed the questionnaire stating, inter alia, that the main data sources in use are internal company information sources and online search engines, and additionally that the time-consuming process of collecting and documenting business ecosystem related information is perceived as a major challenge in the context of business ecosystem analysis.