Enterprise Architecture

{{post_terms.hashtags}}

Lack of Communication and Collaboration in Enterprise Architecture Development

Enterprise architecture (EA) is widely employed to reduce complexity and to improve business–information technology (IT) alignment. Despite the efforts by practitioners and academics in proposing approaches to smoothen EA development, it is not easy to find a fully successful EA. Because EA development is a complex endeavour, it is important to understand the obstacles that practitioners face during EA development. With the grounded theory, we studied how obstacles during EA development emerged from practitioners’ point of view in 15 large enterprises. The study identifies lack of communication and collaboration as the core obstacle that can explain many other obstacles. Communication and collaboration were also harmed by other perceived EA development obstacles, including lack of knowledge and support inside organization and issues imposed by external parties, hesitation in training personnel, setting too ambitious goals, constant change of management, (lack of) clarity in EA development process, lack of budget, forcing personnel to adopt EA, lack of motivation, organizational culture, and organizational structure deficiencies. The lack of communication and collaboration caused several undesired effects to organizations, such as being unable to set common goals and achieve a shared understanding, personnel’s distrust, endangered EA governance, lack of innovation capability, lost competitive edge, and ineffective EA outputs. The study highlights that organisations should improve their communication and collaboration before embarking on EA to encounter fewer obstacles. We provide four recommendations for practitioners to improve communication and collaboration in EA development.

Collaborative Evolution of Enterprise Architecture Models

Enterprise Architecture (EA) management seeks to align business and IT while realizing cost saving potentials, improving availability and fault tolerance, and increasing flexibility of an organization. Regarding these objectives, decision makers need to be supported with solid and relevant models about the organization’s architecture to guide the future development of the EA. In practice, many EA initiatives struggle with inflexible models not meeting the information demand of stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a solution that empowers stakeholders to reveal their information demand collaboratively to facilitate EA models that evolve with changing information demands at runtime. We present core concepts of our approach and insights of an implementation thereof as foundation to achieve our long-term goal of evolving EA models. In our implementation we extend a collaboration platform with capabilities to monitor the actual information demand and to maintain the EA model referring to this demand at runtime. Indexed as A Tool for Collaborative Evolution of Enterprise Architecture Models at Runtime.

The Changing Role of the Enterprise Architect

Enterprise architecture is practiced in different ways, and there are different types of enterprise architects with quite different roles. This paper looks closer at the role of enterprise architects and the importance of the enterprise architects’ understanding of boundary issues in their practice. The paper suggests that enterprise architects must focus on problem-finding more than problem-solving, and should develop not just more dialectic skills, but also dialogic skills. The paper also argues that the enterprise architects must gain a deeper understanding of the enterprise, and need to start working with other enterprise disciplines.

A Viable System Perspective on Enterprise Architecture Management

A number of approaches towards Enterprise Architecture (EA) management is proposed in literature, differing in the underlying understanding of the EA as well as in the description of the function for performing EA management. These plurality of methods and models should be interpreted as an indicator of the low maturity of the research area. In contrast, some researchers see it as inevitable consequence of the diversity of the enterprises under consideration. Staying to this interpretation, we approach the topic of EA management from a cybernetic point of view. Thereby, we elicit constituents, which should be considered in every EA management function based on a viable system perspective on the topic. From this perspective, we further revisit selected EA management approaches and show to which extent they allude to the viable system nature of the EA.

An AHP-based approach toward enterprise architecture analysis based on enterprise architecture quality attributes

Enterprise Architecture (EA) as a discipline that manages large amount of models and information about different aspects of the enterprise, can support decision making on enterprise-wide issues. In order to provide such support, EA information should be amenable to analysis of various utilities and quality attributes. In this regard, we have proposed the idea of characterizing and using enterprise architecture quality attributes. And this paper provides a quantitative AHP-based method toward expert-based EA analysis. Our method proposes a step-by-step process of assessing quality attribute achievement of different scenarios using AHP. By this method, most suitable EA scenarios are selected according to prioritized enterprise utilities and this selection has an important affect on decision making in enterprises. The proposed method also introduces a data structure that contains required information about quality attribute achievement of different EA scenarios in enterprises. The stored asset can be used for further decision making and progress assessment in future. Sensitivity analysis is also part of the process to identify sensitive points in the decision process. The applicability of the proposed method is demonstrated using a practical case study.

Benefits and challenges with Enterprise Architecture: a case study of the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration

Enterprise Architecture is seen as instrumental to drive the digital transformation in enterprises. It is also important to achieve the benefits from innovative new business models and technologies. Many organisations have therefore undertaken extensive efforts to implement Enterprise Architecture (EA). It is, however, a challenging task to implement enterprise architecture in an organisation. There is also very limited research on this issue related to the public sector. This study explores the implementation of enterprise architecture (EA) in the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration – NAV. While the study revealed that NAV had not defined any clear benefits, we found 12 perceived potential benefits. We also uncovered 16 challenges that impeded the EA implementation.