Torben Tambo

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Enterprise Architecture beyond the Enterprise – Extended Enterprise Architecture Revisited

As the most enterprises are relying on relations to other enterprises, it is relevant to consider enterprise architecture for inter-organisational relations particularly those relations involving technology. This has been conceptualised as Extended Enterprise Architecture, and a systematic review of this discipline is the topic of this paper. This paper is taking a point of departure in general theories of business-to-business relationships along with inter-organisational information systems, interoperability and business ecosystems. The general theories are applied to the Extended Enterprise Architecture to emphasize paradoxes, problems and potentials in extending EA across organisational boundaries. The purpose of this paper is to review the concept of Extended Enterprise Architecture (EEA) theoretically and empirically to identify viability of Enterprise Architecture (EA) initiatives spanning across organisational boundaries. A case is presented of an enterprise engaging in technology-based business process integration that in turn is explicated as enterprise architecture initiatives with both more and less powerful partners. This paper underlines the necessity to be able to have EA spanning initiatives across multiple enterprises, but a range of problems is illuminated related to (lack of) precision, imbalance, heterogeneity, transformation, temporality, and (operational) maturity. The concept of EEA is seemingly vague, however this paper calls for a strengthen emphasis on redefining general architectural frameworks to embrace EEA in order to handle typical and modern forms of organisational designs relying on virtual and cross-company as cornerstones.

IT4IT as a Management of Technology framework: Perspectives, implications and contributions

Information technology (IT) is at the core of digitisation of existing business models and dominates in the innovation efforts of many industries. IT has until now in many ways been regarded as exempted from the structuration and automation represented by IT. The IT4IT framework released by The Open Group in October 2015 suggests to a major change. IT has to be governed and structured along defined processes of value chains, life-cycles, service propositions, customer interaction and cost control as any other area of the organization. The purpose of this paper is to review IT4IT as a practical implementation of a Management of Technology framework and to review its perspectives and implications to the MoT society as well as the contributions it has to IT professionals, innovators and MoT practitioners. Methodologically this paper is based on an extensive case study of a large IT service provider. The IT service provider used the framework, along with other frameworks, to introduce larger degree of homogeneity of its own service “catalogues”, improved processes for navigating in the heterogeneity of its customers, and to ensure uniform processes of performance management and reporting. Methodologically this paper has been challenged by the novelty of the topic of IT4IT as only very little peer reviewed materials is available