Ingrid Schirmer

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IT Governance in Scaling Agile Frameworks

Dynamic business environments call for companies’ organizational agility as being able to sense the changes in competitive environments and respond accordingly. A flexible IT environment facilitates this aim but contrasts with the structuration of IT organization through IT governance. We analyze how scaling agile frameworks as blueprints for agile IT organizations solve the contrast between structuration embedded in IT governance and agility. We see converging business and IT in structure and strategy as facilitator for resolving this conflict. In detail, we compare eight scaling agile frameworks on how IT governance is covered, how IT governance decisions are made and whether business IT convergence is achieved. We conclude that IT governance is still predominantly top down decision-making and focuses on traditional business IT alignment instead of business IT convergence. With our analysis, we provide a comprehensive base for organizations to choose from when approaching their specific agility 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.