This paper from The MITRE Corporation presents a summary of the range of potential uses of enterprise architectures (EAs), some of the challenges facing the users of EAs, and practical approaches for developing them incrementally over time to provide “just in time” utility to decision makers.
In the past decade, agile methodologies have become widespread, and the many organizations that employ it have proved successful. To deal with the volatility of the market and to meet dynamic business needs, agile methods seem to be a pragmatic approach. Organizations are keen to scale agile methods across the enterprise to reap the benefits seen in agile teams. Agile Enterprise Architecture can be defined as a process for handling Enterprise Architecture (EA) by applying agile development principles and methods. However, there is a research gap in the adoption of agile Enterprise Architecture. In this paper, I analyze the factors that influence agile EA adoption in large organizations using a grounded theory approach. The evolution of the Enterprise Architect role during the agile EA adoption is presented based on the complex adaptive system theory. A case study is conducted in a leading transportation company which transitioned to agile Enterprise Architecture from traditional methods. This paper focuses on agile Enterprise Architecture adoption from the Enterprise Architects’ viewpoint. My analysis shows that various significant factors influence agile Enterprise Architecture adoption in a large organization. Enterprise Architects are the key personnel in the Governance of Enterprise Architecture and deliver essential business value to an organization. My findings show the changing role of Enterprise Architects when agile Enterprise Architecture is adopted in a large organization. Furthermore, complex adaptive system theory assists in explaining this phenomenon.
This paper presents a number of principles related to the construction and use of enterprise architecture frameworks. These principles are intended to guide the development of a formal foundation for frameworks but also serve as guidance for efforts to enable the interoperability of enterprise models and model components. The principles are drawn from analyses of a number of existing frameworks and from observation of and participation in framework development.
Australian government enterprises have shown a significant interest in the cloud technology-enabled enterprise transformation. Australian government suggests the whole-of-a-government strategy to cloud adoption. The challenge is how best to realise this cloud adoption strategy for the cloud technology-enabled enterprise transformation? The cloud adoption strategy realisation requires concrete guidelines and a comprehensive practical framework. This paper proposes the use of an agile enterprise architecture framework to developing and implementing the adaptive cloud technology-enabled enterprise architecture in the Australian government context. The results of this paper indicate that a holistic strategic agile enterprise architecture approach seems appropriate to support the strategic whole-of-a-government approach to cloud technology-enabled government enterprise transformation.
The article provides an overview of the challenges and the state of the art of the discipline of Enterprise Architecture (EA), with emphasis on the challenges and future development opportunities of the underlying Information System (IS), and its IT implementation, the Enterprise Information System (EIS). The first challenge is to overcome the narrowness of scope of present practice in IS and EA, and re-gain the coverage of the entire business on all levels of management, and a holistic and systemic coverage of the enterprise as an economic entity in its social and ecological environment. The second challenge is how to face the problems caused by complexity that limit the controllability and manageability of the enterprise as a system. The third challenge is connected with the complexity problem, and describes fundamental issues of sustainability and viability. Following from the third, the fourth challenge is to identify modes of survival for systems, and dynamic system architectures that evolve and are resilient to changes of the environment in which they live. The state of the art section provides pointers to possible radical changes to models, methodologies, theories and tools in EIS design and implementation, with the potential to solve these grand challenges.
Much existing research on IS and enterprise architecture focuses on suggesting different representa-tions describing a ‘target architecture’ for processes, information and information systems at different levels across the organization. Less emphasis has been put on the actual evolution of the current en-terprise architecture towards this envisioned ‘target architecture’. In this paper we look at enterprise architecture from a process perspective and explore how actual practices of architecting enfold and how they are mutually shaped by context. In doing so, we offer two contributions. First, we contribute empirically showing how enterprise architecting in practice is an ambidextrous activity focusing on both fixing the limitations of historically entrenched architectures and establishing new architecture by betting on what needs are going to give the most flexibility and value in the future. Secondly, we contribute by conceptualizing how enterprise architecture evolves over time, and propose the concepts of ‘architectural path-dependency’ and ‘enterprise architecting’. Architectural path-dependencies is the effect of existing architectures that become economically, technically and organizationally hard to change – at least in a radical manner. Enterprise architecting, on the other hand, is the intentional acts to circumvent path-dependencies and evolve towards an envisioned architecture. Henceforth, we argue that enterprise architecture transition is shaped by multiple architectural path-dependencies as well as various acts of enterprise architecting to establish new paths. The paper discusses theses con-cepts in relation to existing literature on software and enterprise architecture.
