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Adaptive Enterprise Architecture Driven Agile Development

Agile development practices focus on developing and delivering working software systems in small iterations with minimal documentation. However, locally project focused agile practices overlook the need for holistic enterprise architecture. Lack of enterprise architecture in agile, especially in the large agile environments, may lead to a number of problems such as technical debt, unnecessary re-work, inconsistent communication, locally focused isolated architecture, design and implementation. There is a missing link between the enterprise architecture and agile development. Enterprise architecture is a strategic capability that should enable and enhance agility of agile development. However, organisations are not sure how best to approach strategic enterprise architecture capability for supporting agile development. This paper proposes and demonstrate the applicability of an integrated adaptive enterprise architecture driven agile development approach for large agile environments.

Perceived Benefits from Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture has been developed in order to optimize the alignment between business needs and the (rapidly changing) possibilities of information technology. But do organizations indeed benefit from the application of Enterprise Architecture according to those who are in any way involved in architecture? To answer this question, a model has been developed (the Enterprise Architecture Value Framework) to organize the benefits of Enterprise Architecture. Based on this model, a survey has been conducted among the various types of stakeholders of Enterprise Architecture, such as architects, project managers, developers and business or IT managers. In the survey the respondents were asked to what extent they perceive various benefits of Enterprise Architecture in their organization. The results of this survey (with 287 fully completed responses) are analyzed and presented in this paper. In all categories of the framework benefits are perceived, though to different extent. Very few benefits are perceived in relation to the external orientation of the organization. Few statistically significant correlations were found in relation to the background of the respondents: the overall view on benefits of Enterprise Architecture appeared independent of the role of the respondents, the economic sector and the number of years of experience with architecture

Factors Influencing the Engagement Between Enterprise Architects and Stakeholders in Enterprise Architecture Development

The development of Enterprise Architecture (EA) is facing several challenges. The highly referenced challenges in literature are related to enterprise architects and stakeholders. The enterprise architects and the stakeholders are the main actors in EA development. However, there are limited studies that cover the relationship of the enterprise architects and the stakeholders. The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors characterizing the engagement of enterprise architects and the stakeholders in EA development. The study used a systematic literature review (SLR) as a method to identify the factors and proposing an initial engagement model. The SLR revealed 12 factors that influence the engagement between the enterprise architect and the stakeholders. These factors are organized using the multiple perspective theory under three perspectives namely; technical, organizational and personal that comprise the initial engagement model. The study is contributing by shedding the light on the key aspects of engagement factors between the enterprise architects and the stakeholders in the development of EA. Furthermore, it is an initial step towards developing the engagement framework by comprehending these key aspects.

Conceptualization of an Abstract Language to Support Value Co-Creation

Companies willing to survive the numeric economy are forced to collaborate with each other in order to maximize their co-creation of value. This co-creation exists for many reasons: to sell and acquire information, goods and services, to optimize the quality of procedures, to improve security and privacy, etc. In this paper, we analyze and model value co-creation through three dimensions: the value’s nature, the method of value creation, and the business object impacted by the value. By combining these dimensions, we afterwards suggest different types of co-creation schemas, and we propose an abstract language to communicate them. The latter is finally validated by applying the The Physics of Notations guidelines.

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.

Organizational Learning Supported by Reference Architecture Models: Industry 4.0 Laboratory Study

The wave of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) is bringing a new vision of the manufacturing industry. In manufacturing, one of the buzzwords of the moment is “Smart production”. Smart production involves manufacturing equipment with many sensors that can generate and transmit large amounts of data. These data and information from manufacturing operations are however not shared in the organization. Therefore the organization is not using them to learn and improve their operations. To address this problem, the authors implemented in an Industry 4.0 laboratory an instance of an emerging technical standard specific for the manufacturing industry. Global manufacturing experts consider the Reference Architecture Model Industry 4.0 (RAMI4.0) as one of the corner stones for the implementation of Industry 4.0. The instantiation contributed to organizational learning in the laboratory by collecting and sharing up-to-date information concerning manufacturing equipment. This article discusses and generalizes the experience and outlines future research directions.