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Why Your Company Needs More Collaboration

Digitization demands a focus on cooperation and collaboration that is unprecedented for most enterprises.What distinguishes companies that have built advanced digital capabilities? The ability to collaborate. MIT Sloan Management Review’s research finds that a focus on collaboration — both within organizations and with external partners and stakeholders — is central to how digitally advanced companies create business value and establish competitive advantage. These companies recognize that digital transformation blurs — and sometimes obliterates — traditional organizational boundaries and demands a focus on cooperation and collaboration that is unprecedented for most enterprises. Based on a global survey of more than 3,500 managers and executives, MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte’s third annual report on digital business found that the most digitally advanced companies – those successfully deploying digital technologies and capabilities to improve processes, engage talent across the organization, and drive new value-generating business models – are far more likely to perform cross-functional collaboration. More than 70% of these businesses use cross-functional teams to organize work and charge them with implementing digital business priorities. This compares to less than 30% for organizations in an early stage of digitization.

Where Do We Find Services in Enterprise Architectures? A Comparative Approach

In recent years, enterprise architecture (EA) has captured growing attention as a means to systematically consolidate and interrelate diverse IT artefacts in order to provide holistic decision support. Since the emergence of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), many attempts have been made to incorporate SOA artefacts in existing EA frameworks. Yet the approaches taken to achieve this goal differ substantially for the most commonly used EA frameworks to date. This paper investigates and compares five widely used EA frameworks in the way they embrace the SOA paradigm. It identifies what SOA artefacts are considered to be in the respective EA frameworks and their relative position in the overall structure. The results show that services and related artefacts are far from being well-integrated constructs in current EA frameworks. The comparison presented in this paper will support practitioners in identifying an EA framework that provides SOA support in a way that matches their requirements and will hopefully inspire the academic EA and SOA communities to work on a closer integration of these architectures.

Lack of Communication and Collaboration in Enterprise Architecture Development

Enterprise architecture (EA) is widely employed to reduce complexity and to improve business–information technology (IT) alignment. Despite the efforts by practitioners and academics in proposing approaches to smoothen EA development, it is not easy to find a fully successful EA. Because EA development is a complex endeavour, it is important to understand the obstacles that practitioners face during EA development. With the grounded theory, we studied how obstacles during EA development emerged from practitioners’ point of view in 15 large enterprises. The study identifies lack of communication and collaboration as the core obstacle that can explain many other obstacles. Communication and collaboration were also harmed by other perceived EA development obstacles, including lack of knowledge and support inside organization and issues imposed by external parties, hesitation in training personnel, setting too ambitious goals, constant change of management, (lack of) clarity in EA development process, lack of budget, forcing personnel to adopt EA, lack of motivation, organizational culture, and organizational structure deficiencies. The lack of communication and collaboration caused several undesired effects to organizations, such as being unable to set common goals and achieve a shared understanding, personnel’s distrust, endangered EA governance, lack of innovation capability, lost competitive edge, and ineffective EA outputs. The study highlights that organisations should improve their communication and collaboration before embarking on EA to encounter fewer obstacles. We provide four recommendations for practitioners to improve communication and collaboration in EA development.

Dynamic Ambidexterity: Exploiting Exploration for Business Success in the Digital Age

In the digital age, many firms find the pace of change in their industry is increasing. New competitors emerge from previously unrelated industries and innovative digital business models can quickly disrupt well-established market dynamics. Such jolts in the competitive landscape require existing players to be continually innovating while also “keeping the lights on” to maintain existing revenue streams. This paper reviews the IS literature on ambidexterity – the ability to simultaneously pursue strategies of resource exploration and exploitation – and advances a theoretical model for embedding innovative business models into existing organizational routines. It contributes to the literature by reconciling the structural and contextual views of ambidexterity through introducing a dynamic ambidexterity framework. This approach proposes ambidexterity as a dynamic capability which requires differing mechanisms in the initiation and implementation phases of innovation.

Collaborative Evolution of Enterprise Architecture Models

Enterprise Architecture (EA) management seeks to align business and IT while realizing cost saving potentials, improving availability and fault tolerance, and increasing flexibility of an organization. Regarding these objectives, decision makers need to be supported with solid and relevant models about the organization’s architecture to guide the future development of the EA. In practice, many EA initiatives struggle with inflexible models not meeting the information demand of stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a solution that empowers stakeholders to reveal their information demand collaboratively to facilitate EA models that evolve with changing information demands at runtime. We present core concepts of our approach and insights of an implementation thereof as foundation to achieve our long-term goal of evolving EA models. In our implementation we extend a collaboration platform with capabilities to monitor the actual information demand and to maintain the EA model referring to this demand at runtime. Indexed as A Tool for Collaborative Evolution of Enterprise Architecture Models at Runtime.

Revisiting the Impact of Information Systems Architecture Complexity: A Complex Adaptive Systems Perspective

Organizations constantly adapt their Information Systems (IS) architecture to reflect changes in their environment. In general, such adaptations steadily increase the complexity of their IS architecture, thereby negatively impacting IS efficiency and IS flexibility. Based on a Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) perspective, we present a more differentiated analysis of the impact of IS architecture complexity. We hypothesize the relation between IS architecture complexity on the one hand, and IS efficiency and IS flexibility on the other hand to be mediated by evolutionary and revolutionary IS change. Subsequently, we test our hypotheses through a partial least squares (PLS) approach to structural equation modelling (SEM) based on survey data from 185 respondents. We find that the direct negative impact of IS architecture complexity on IS efficiency and IS flexibility is no longer statistically relevant when also considering the mediating effects of revolutionary and evolutionary IS change.