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Evaluating the capabilities of Enterprise Architecture modeling tools for Visual Analysis

By: . In model analysis activities, it is critical to make early statements and diagnosis from a high level of abstraction. Currently, these tasks are difficult to perform, and they require both the involvement of experts and the elaboration of specialized artifacts. Furthermore, the complexity of the tasks increases as models become bigger and more detailed. In other contexts, it has been noticed that total / holistic / unfiltered visualizations may give insight about the models, providing analysts a starting point for exploration and general pattern discovery. In this paper, we evaluate the support that six different Enterprise Architecture (EA) modeling tools offer to EA analysis activities, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of six visualization frameworks, in order to extend the analysis of enterprise models by Visual Analysis. The evaluation is based on a set of 14 requirements which are either visualization-related or specific to EA analysis, and its results were harvested from a) observed characteristics of the diagrams of these tools, and b) visualizations from an enterprise model, generated with the aforementioned visualization frameworks. These results point to several actionable subjects and research opportunities for the field of EA Modeling and Analysis.

How do Committees Invent?

The original article defining Conway’s Law, which states: Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce system which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

The Integrated Enterprise: Enterprise Architecture, Investment Process and System Development

The enterprise architecture provides benefits to the organization that utilizes it. However, if the enterprise architecture is not tightly coupled with other enterprise level programs such as investment management and system development process, its overall effectiveness is compromised. This paper will identify the process integration and enterprise architecture touchpoints from the perspective of the investment management process and it outlines an overall Integrated Enterprise Life Cycle process flow. The paper also presents a case study of the implementation of the enterprise life cycle process flow.

How Enterprise Architecture Maturity Enables Post-Merger IT Integration

While world-wide Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As) activity continues to accelerate, a substantial proportion of deals fails to yield the expected value. The inability to plan and implement post-merger integration of information technology contributes substantially to these failure rates. This paper advances the argument that a company’s pre-existing Enterprise Architecture decisively shapes the capability to implement post-merger IT integration and subsequently realize benefits from M&A. Our multiple-case study investigates three acquisition cases and develops an explanatory theory of how Enterprise Architecture maturity enables the implementation of distinct integration strategies. The results do not only enrich the academic literature on M&A, but also show the strategic value of Enterprise Architecture maturity.

Virtual Decoupling for IT/Business Alignment – Conceptual Foundations, Architecture Design and Implementation Example

IT/business alignment is one of the main topics of information systems research. If IT artifacts and business-related artifacts are coupled point-to-point, however, complex architectures become unmanageable over time. In computer science, concepts like the ANSI/SPARC three-level database architecture propose an architecture layer which decouples external views on data and the implementation view of data. In this paper, a similar approach for IT/business alignment is proposed. The proposed alignment architecture is populated by enterprise services as elementary artifacts. Enterprise services link software components and process activities. They are aggregated into applications and subsequently into domains for planning/design and communication purposes. Most design approaches for the construction of enterprise services, applications and domains are top-down, i. e. they decompose complex artifacts on a stepwise basis. As an alternative which takes into account coupling semantics, we propose a bottom-up approach which is demonstrated for the identification of domains. Our approach is evaluated using a telecommunications equipment case study.

Requisite variety and its implications for the control of complex systems

Recent work on the fundamental processes of regulation in biology (Ashby, 1956) has shown the importance of a certain quantitative relation called the law of requisite variety. After this relation had been found, we appreciated that it was related to a theorem in a world far removed from the biological—that of Shannon on the quantity of noise or error that could be removed through a correction-channel (Shannon and Weaver, 1949; theorem 10). In this paper I propose to show the relationship between the two theorems, and to indicate something of their implications for regulation, in the cybernetic sense, when the system to be regulated is extremely complex. Since the law of requisite variety uses concepts more primitive than those used by entropy, I will start by giving an account of that law.