Enterprise Architecture

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The Enterprise and its Architecture: Ontology and Challenges

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a set of concepts and practices based on holistic systems thinking, principles of shared language, and the long-standing disciplines of engineering and architecture. EA represents a change in how we think about and manage information technologies (ITs) and the organizations they serve. Many existing organizational activities are EA-type activities, but done in isolation, by different groups, using different tools, models, and vernaculars. EA is about bridging the chasms among these activities, from strategy to operations, and better aligning, integrating, optimizing, and synergizing the whole organization. This article: (1) posits that EA is about the architecture of the entire enterprise including its ITs

Institutionalization of Contested Practices: A Case of Enterprise Architecture Implementation in a US State Government

Information Systems (IS) practices are often ‘institutionally contested’ when introduced into organizations. They run counter to the status quo and disrupt organizational stability. Furthermore, they contravene the normative, regulatory, and cultural-cognitive legitimacy in existing institutionalized processes. This research explores contested practices, examining the struggles and techniques IS organizations use to legitimize and institutionalize them. Using an institutional change and translation perspective, we investigate a case of Enterprise Architecture (EA) implementations in a US state government, highlighting the struggles in translating new practices to connect to potential users and in connecting new practices to existing norms, regulations, and cultural values. We elucidate two key techniques to overcome these struggles: inductive communication to make new practices relatable to users, and the deployment of experts to local contexts to facilitate knowledge transfer. The research shows how institutional change unfolds and informs practitioners of how to legitimize EA practices.

Integrating Innovation into Enterprise Architecture Management

The ability of organizations to innovate is acknowledged as an essential capability to compete in a competitive market. This paper proposes to use enterprise architecture management as a systematic approach to innovate the enterprise. The enterprise architecture approach is based on a comprehensive architecture framework which aligns the domains of business -, application – and infrastructure architecture. The framework addresses all dimensions relevant for enterprise innovation like business mod-el, organization, processes, and technology and provides appro-priate design techniques. A comprehensive architecture development process is introduced which integrates innovation as a central element for the enter-prise architecture design. The process encompasses all activities from business vision

Enterprise Architecture Planning: Analyses of Requirements from Practice and Research

Enterprise architecture management (EAM) has become an increasingly important topic in practice due to the growing complexity of organizations and their underlying IT. While there is a strong interest in Enterprise Architecture (EA) modeling, evaluation, and frameworks, a lack of knowledge remains in the research field of EA planning. We conducted a series of expert interviews on the topic of EA planning. From these interviews we were able to extract requirements for EA planning from practice as the foundation of our analyses. Additionally, we conducted a structured literature review to elicit requirements for EA planning from a research perspective. This paper combines the results of both the practitioner interviews and the literature review to emphasize the gaps between the two worlds. As a result, we identified that current research does not adequately address the pressing problems of EA planning in practice.

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.

Organizational Learning Supported by Reference Architecture Models: Industry 4.0 Laboratory Study

The wave of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) is bringing a new vision of the manufacturing industry. In manufacturing, one of the buzzwords of the moment is “Smart production”. Smart production involves manufacturing equipment with many sensors that can generate and transmit large amounts of data. These data and information from manufacturing operations are however not shared in the organization. Therefore the organization is not using them to learn and improve their operations. To address this problem, the authors implemented in an Industry 4.0 laboratory an instance of an emerging technical standard specific for the manufacturing industry. Global manufacturing experts consider the Reference Architecture Model Industry 4.0 (RAMI4.0) as one of the corner stones for the implementation of Industry 4.0. The instantiation contributed to organizational learning in the laboratory by collecting and sharing up-to-date information concerning manufacturing equipment. This article discusses and generalizes the experience and outlines future research directions.