Peter Bernus Archives

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

Enterprise engineering and management at the crossroads

The article provides an overview of the challenges and the state of the art of the discipline of Enterprise Architecture (EA), with emphasis on the challenges and future development opportunities of the underlying Information System (IS), and its IT implementation, the Enterprise Information System (EIS). The first challenge is to overcome the narrowness of scope of present practice in IS and EA, and re-gain the coverage of the entire business on all levels of management, and a holistic and systemic coverage of the enterprise as an economic entity in its social and ecological environment. The second challenge is how to face the problems caused by complexity that limit the controllability and manageability of the enterprise as a system. The third challenge is connected with the complexity problem, and describes fundamental issues of sustainability and viability. Following from the third, the fourth challenge is to identify modes of survival for systems, and dynamic system architectures that evolve and are resilient to changes of the environment in which they live. The state of the art section provides pointers to possible radical changes to models, methodologies, theories and tools in EIS design and implementation, with the potential to solve these grand challenges.

Enterprise Thinking for Self-aware Systems

The paper aims to provide high-level guidance for architects of cyber-physical enterprises such that the nature of interactions within it as a system can be largely self-determined based on system self awareness and dynamic self-configuration, and a set of foundational guiding principles, rather than being pre-defined by an external designer or architect. The paper investigates the suitability of typical development life cycles and architectural challenges in the context of dynamic cyber-physical systems intending to utilize the power of the Internet of Things, and then goes on to define desired attributes of such systems, which need to guide suitable core architectural choices. Application of the findings is exemplified through a case study, followed by synthesis of issues and implications for further research.