James Lapalme

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Organizations (and organizing) are a technology that humans know very little about

The human-made technology that is used by organizations has played a crucial role in enabling humans to accomplish impressive endeavors. Despite the critical importance that organizations (or organizing) have played (and still play) in shaping the modern world, they are a technology that humans know very little about, and are still struggling to design and use adequately. The crux of the problem is that the study of organizations (including their design) does not fit neatly into the boxes that are modern academic disciplines. Another important series of issues concerns conducting multidisciplinary research across the silos of academic discipline. Crossing these silos is especially difficult when trying to cross-pollinate ideas as well as publish because of terminological, political, and social challenges. As such, the ODandEE journal is a necessary and important step in the right direction for addressing these issues by promoting research that is both multidisciplinary as well as oriented towards the proactive stance of design and engineering.

How Does Enterprise Architecture Support Innovation?

Innovation is becoming increasingly important for Enterprise Architecture (EA) teams. Consequently, it is crucial that tools be developed to assist Enterprise Architecture teams when evaluating how (and how well) they are supporting innovation within the context of their enterprise. To date very little research has been completed that focuses on both EA and innovation. This paper presents an assessment tool to help EA teams evaluate and improve how they support innovation. The tool has been tested in a case study with a hi-tech firm and initial results are presented. In 2015 International Conference on Enterprise Systems (ES).

Three Schools of Thought on Enterprise Architecture

Three schools of thought on enterprise architecture exist, each with its own belief system (definitions, concerns, assumptions, and limitations). A novel taxonomy of these schools creates a starting point for resolving terminological challenges to help establish enterprise architecture as a discipline.

Investigation of the Lack of Common Understanding in the Discipline of Enterprise Architecture : A Systematic Mapping Study

The number of publications, along with the organization of new conferences are a couple of the relevant elements that usually indicate the progress of an area of study over the years. This is definitely true in the case of the Enterprise Architecture (EA) discipline, which went from having its first journal article published in 1989 to over two hundred published articles by 2015. But in spite of this evolution, EA is still suffering from a considerable lack of common understanding. It has become very important to investigate the current state of affairs concerning the EA discipline through its relevant publications in order to shed some light on this challenge. 171 journal papers published between 1990 and 2015 were systematically selected and examined in order to accomplish this investigation. The quantitative and qualitative findings of this examination show that EA is a young discipline which raises a growing interest in recent years. This examination also confirms the lack of common understanding in EA, which can be observed in the different descriptions of the term “enterprise architecture,” and in the diversity of perspective with regards to the whole discipline. Several issues related to this lack has been reported, such as multidisciplinary issue, language issue, structure of research and mode of observation issues. The major issue concerns the absence of enough research to shed some light on this challenge. In addition to this investigation, helpful directions for future research in this area was proposed.

Exploring the future of enterprise architecture: A Zachman perspective

Today, and for the foreseeable future, organizations will face ever-increasing levels of complexity and uncertainty. Many believe that enterprise architecture (EA) will help organizations address such difficult terrain by guiding the design of adaptive and resilient enterprises and their information systems. This paper presents the Grand Challenges that we believe will challenge organizations in the future and need to be addressed by enterprise architecture. As a first step in using enterprise architecture as a solution for overcoming identified challenges, the Zachman Enterprise Architecture Framework is used to guide and structure the discussion. The paper presents the Grand Challenges and discusses promising theories and models for addressing them. In addition, current advances in the field of enterprise architecture that have begun to address the challenges will be presented. In conclusion, final thoughts on the future of enterprise architecture as a research field and a profession are offered.

Analysing enterprise architecture maturity models: a learning perspective

In order to aid organisations in the adoption of enterprise architecture (EA) best practices, maturity models have been proposed in the literature. These models offer organisational roadmaps and assessment frameworks for increasing EA maturity. However, key questions concerning the implied meaning of the term maturity in the context of these models have been left unexplored by previous research. This research, aided by the field of organisational learning, offers new insights into the implied assumptions of current EA maturity models and offers initial concepts and constructs to guide the conceptualisation, construction and refinement of enterprise maturity models.