Article

In its current form, Enterprise Architecture (EA) is often confined to the IT domain. This confinement contradicts most theoretical definitions of the concept which emphasize that EA should span the entire enterprise to create coherency and alignment. To unleash EA from the IT domain, we suggest the utilization of Coherency Management (CM) to involve and embed employees in the architectural development. Our interpretation and version of CM is the result of a single case study of the global brewery Carlsberg, based on the issues experienced by Carlsberg when utilizing initiatives to design and document the enterprise. Qualitative interviews with managers from business units and strategic initiatives constituted the empirical data in our study. The case study‟s primary findings were that each strategic initiative delivered satisfactory results in itself, yet experienced problems regarding the cooperation with the other initiatives. The issues of designing the enterprise architecture were found to be a question of coordination and cooperation between the enterprise designers, rather than the performance and scope of each individual designer. Additionally, a lack of trust and awareness made it more difficult for the employees to benefit from the work of the strategic initiatives. Based on these findings, we assess that CM should be a means to leverage the information from the different initiatives and business units to form a holistic overview of the enterprise, and that CM should aim to improve and coordinate the design of the EA. To practice CM in an organization, we present the ExCoM framework consisting of three layers: Services, Continuous Activities, and Information Retrieval.

What is the Enterprise Architectures value and how it can be assessed and demonstrated has been a topic subject to an interesting discussion among practitioners and researchers. Although this discussion has continued for several years, there is still no consensus about what the value of an Enterprise Architecture is and how it can be demonstrated. The lack of a clear understanding of the concept of value, the need to consider different views (of stakeholders) in assessing the value, the difficulty in identifying the key variables that contribute to the value and how and on what terms they should be measured and, finally, the organization‟s need to quickly prove the architecture‟s value are, in our opinion, the main issues contributing to the complexity and difficulty in assessing the Enterprise Architecture‟s value. In this article we discuss these main issues on value assessment and we make an introductory reference to an approach based on Enterprise Architecture value drivers that is being studied and which may be useful to mitigate these problems and, consequently, used in value assessment of Enterprise Architectures.

This article advocates for a complete restructuring of the Services Viewpoint and Views within the DoD Architecture Framework (DoDAF) V2.0. It introduces the concept of overloading of the term “Service” within DoDAF V2.0, and provides a means of clarifying what is meant in the DoDAF regarding Services via the introduction of the term “Commoditized Service” into the DoDAF vernacular. The Commoditized Service is a manifestation of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) at a higher level of abstraction than Web Services; it is not in-and-of-itself a Performer – the definition of Service in DoDAF V2.0 states a Service requires a Performer [as a Mechanism] to execute. The Commoditized Service (as well as the Web Service), requires a Service Level Agreement (SLA) to declare available functionality for the Service. This article introduces the concept of the SLA as a means of „information hiding‟ for the Commoditized Service, which allows for the manifestation of three concepts: (1) Capabilities as Systems that are bought or developed outright that are internal or functionally-specific applications, with no intention of offering underlying capabilities as a Service. (2) Outsourcing Capability (or parts of a Capability) to Commoditized Services. (3) Building the Service „in house‟ with the intention of offering it as a Commoditized Service. Each has different requirements regarding development of DoDAF artifacts; each case is discussed in detail as to the artifacts required for their manifestation. Finally, the article proposes a means of management of the underlying data associated with Commoditized Services. As such, what is presented is a logical construct for accommodating and modeling Commoditized Services, Web Services, Systems, Organizations, and People, providing value added to the architect and the organizations they support.

While statistical indicators point to increased productivity and excess capacity from our current workforce, other sources caution against assuming any of that dynamic is sustainable over the next few years. Managing our way through an investment-averse business climate since 2001, significant labor reductions since 2007, and expected baby boomer retirement after 2010, we need to prepare our enterprise for significant cultural and environmental change. Though “running lean” is the new expectation for managing our businesses, we may be transposing expectations for current productivity levels with future state capabilities as the economy improves. Enterprise Architects will serve a unique role in helping our organizations navigate their way out of recession and into a sustainable growth model during the next economic recovery.

Identifying, gathering, and maintaining information on the current, planned, and target states of the architecture of an enterprise is one major challenge of enterprise architecture (EA) management. A multitude of approaches towards EA management are proposed in literature greatly differing regarding the underlying perception of EA management and the description of the function for performing EA management. The aforementioned plurality of methods and models can be interpreted as an indicator for the low maturity of the research area or as an inevitable consequence of the diversity of the enterprises under consideration pointing to the enterprise-specificity of the topic. In this article, we use a knowledge management perspective to analyze selected EA management approaches from literature. Thereby, we elicit constituents, which should be considered in every EA management function from the knowledge management cycle proposed by Probst. Based on the analysis results, we propose future research topics for the area of EA management.