Article

This article discusses the “chicken or the egg” dilemma between business strategy and enterprise architecture. Presenting the use of strategy as an influencer in determining the enterprise architecture approach, the article progresses by discussing how enterprise architecture may be used to execute strategy and inform the strategic management process. For every enterprise architect working within either the public or private sector, strategic alignment of the enterprise architecture approach should be made as important a priority as the strategic alignment of the enterprise architecture artifacts themselves. In this article, we stand on the premise that an organization’s strategic foundation should serve as the guiding principle for all business management disciplines including the development and maintenance of enterprise architecture. However, we also make painstakingly clear that effective strategy formulation and execution cannot occur without a reliable and actionable enterprise architecture.

Making the business case for enterprise architecture (EA); or a systematic approach to the alignment information technologies with business functions seems like “chip shot” in today’s cost-conscious business world. IT departments around the globe are continually seeking ways to reduce sky-rocketing maintenance costs and to eliminate redundant legacy information systems. The business-side of the house is continually pressing for bigger, better and faster technological capabilities in order to sift through and capitalize on the vast amounts of data that has been compiled. When a project comes along that addresses these concerns, one would assume that it would be “slam dunk” for selection by the firm’s governance board. Conceptually speaking, EA makes complete business sense as it has the potential to revolutionize how IT is conducted around the world; similar to how Toyota’s Total Quality Management system revolutionized how manufacturing operations are performed. But what about the return-on-investment, total cost of ownership, and discounted cash flows? Can an enterprise architecture program pass the rigorous financial tests of the reluctant-to-spent corporate bureaucrats? More importantly, can enterprise architecture survive the politics of a mature organization that is already set in their ways? This article applies the same analytical approaches that one would use in the selection of a new application or hardware to see how well EA holds up to the test. This work also addresses some of the key areas of contention that may arise when an organization begins to debate why they may or may not require an enterprise architecture program at their firm. Finally, several best practices are highlighted which identify the hallmarks of a well-implemented EA program.

In the past few years there has been a major leap in the size of data that exist on the Web. Especially the launch of Web 2.0 websites like Wikipedia.org or YouTube.com had its effect on the presented information complexity as well as its actuality. There has been also a steady rise of B2B transactions enabled by the exchange of data between companies. The actual acceptance of e-commerce applications increased the amount of transactions in the B2C segment as well. As these changes already affected the structures of today’s Enterprise Architectures (EAs), future architectural concepts in this context will have to pick up challenges which are caused by the dynamic availability of a huge amount of services as variable elements of a next generation of enterprise software systems and system landscape. The article focuses on the problem of the dynamic discovery and invocation of appropriate Web Services in EA environments to fulfill this purpose. The proposed model is based on a decentralized network of Web Service providers and uses software agents which are responsible for the intelligent discovery and management of Web Service-Endpoints suitable to the needs of the consuming entity. The model considers preferences of users as dynamic criteria. Furthermore the reputation of service providers is seen as collective knowledge of a user community whereas past experiences of neighbored users influence the autonomous acting of user agents. Thus, relevant Web Services will be semantically described and discovered in a collaborative manner. The proposed architectural model is based on an open network architecture which abandons central elements for the management of service offerings in order to increase the openness of conventional architecture approaches. This article shows what current SWS technology offers in respect to the requirements needed by future EA scenarios and will point out the potentials of current SWS technologies in the EAI and B2B context. Furthermore SWS frameworks will be investigated according to their potential as regards to a dynamic discovery and invocation in the given context.

This paper represents a significant point of evolution in thought and practice about the design andmanagement of complex enterprises that often exist inhighly dynamic, sometimes chaoticoperating environments. The paper asserts that Coherency Management is the primary outcome goal of Enterprise Architecture (EA); that the architecture of enterprises should be formalized and promote coherency; and the best way to do this is to adopt EA as the ongoing, overarching method for abstracting, analyzing, designing, and re-engineering new and existing enterprises – regardless of the market, industry, or government sector that the enterprise belongs to. EA is about more than technology as it now has strategic and business dimensions – all of which must align to create agility and assurance in promoting transformation and delivering value. The paper discusses three modes of EA, namely Foundation Architecture, Extended Architecture and Embedded Architecture, that represent progression in thought and practice, with emphasis that the modes are independent but not necessarily mutually exclusive. The paper also discusses how collectively these influence enterprise coherency. The paper concludes by elaborating the ways and approaches to assess organizational coherence.

The U.S. Federal information technology (IT) space is currently experiencing the emergence and promotion of many seemingly disconnected and overlapping frameworks. This article provides an introduction to current prevalent and relevant IT frameworks and suggests possible relationships to the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) and EA function, with the intended audience being the current Federal sector EA practitioner.