Enterprise Architecture

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Enterprise Architecture: Enabling Integration, Agility and Change

Three core imperatives are essential for modern businesses and organizations: seamless integration of customer and operational processes, agility, and the ability to change. These imperatives are relevant in view of successfully executing strategic choices, but all too often not satisfied. Businesses and organizations are complex adaptive socio-technical systems and can be viewed from two fundamentally different perspectives: the functional (black-box) perspective and the constructional (white-box) perspective. Management and governance of businesses and organizations regard the functional, black-box perspective, which is inherently ill-suited for addressing the imperatives mentioned. It will be argued that establishing system integration, agility and change requires a focus on the system’s design, hence necessitates the constructional perspective. The concept of architecture is considered fundamental for operationalizing the constructional perspective. Next to the more familiar notion of technology architecture, the concepts of business, organizational and information architecture are formally introduced and elucidated. Various domains within these architectures will be highlighted, whereby the importance of coherence and consistency is stressed, especially in view of the ability to change. Collectively, the four architectures are labeled Enterprise Architecture. Finally, enterprise architecture will be positioned as a crucial means for linking strategy development and execution.

A Framework for Exploring Digital Business Ecosystems

ICT-enabled business solutions have created a possibility for automated business relations and transactions. Digital business ecosystems are becoming an increasingly popular concept for modeling and building distributed systems in heterogeneous, decentralized and open environments. However, traditional economic and computing theories do not focus on digital business ecosystems as a separate form of organization and they do not provide conceptual frameworks that can be used to explore digital business ecosystems. In this paper, we present a framework for exploring digital business ecosystems developed from Zachman’s enterprise architecture. This framework serves as a structure for exploring the value network and the enterprise as part of a digital business ecosystem.

From Enterprise Architecture to Business Ecosystem Architecture: Stages and challenges for extending architectures beyond organizational boundaries

Today, Enterprises act in an increasingly interconnected world and in different kinds of collaborative networks. They are part of business ecosystems in which they interact with their customers, partners and competitors. The processes of analyzing and planning the intertwinement of business and IT architecture within enterprises has been successfully supported by enterprise architecture management (EAM) approaches. In this paper, we analyze four cases from different industries (health care, logistics, retail, and education) and argue that the intra-organizational concepts of enterprise architectures (EA) and EAM need to be extended to grasp the challenges of the enterprises’ interconnectedness. Beyond the known concepts of extended enterprise architecture and federated architectures, we define five stages of extended architectures. Additionally, we describe challenges and existing solutions, which are relevant for this extended perspective.

The Economic Benefits of Enterprise Architecture

The main purpose of this book is achieving awareness at management level as well as at enterprise architects level about adopting an economic approach when dealing with Enterprise Architecture programs. This book explains the areas of economic benefits of Enterprise Architecture programs, the different views as well as a holistic approach to show the areas of economic benefits. Economic methods, models and approaches are described in short to show, how to quantify and manage the economic benefits of Enterprise Architecture programs as well as how Enterprise Architecture supports Enterprise Portfolio Management. This book has not the intention to be a scientific research document, nor a handbook to deliver solutions for all your EA related economic issues.

From Business Strategy to IT Action: Right Decisions for a Better Bottom Line

From Business Strategy to IT Action gives companies of all sizes the tools to effectively link IT to business strategy and produce effective, actionable strategies for bottom-line results. The authors present CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, and IT managers with a powerful and accessible resource packed with such useful material as the Strategy-to-Bottom-Line Value Chain, which integrates the management practices relating to planning, prioritization, alignment, and assessing a company’s entire IT budget; methods for using IT Impact Management to establish IT culture and performance models for the business/IT connection; the IT Improvement Zone, which quickly identifies where a company can focus its energies for maximum results, etc.

Strategic IT Portfolio Management

Strategic IT Portfolio Management delivers a solution to the IT dilemma that has evolved over the past 40 years – namely, how do we get the most value from our IT investment? Author Jeff Kaplan, a lead partner in the Strategic IT Management Practice at consulting firm PRTM, puts nearly two decades of expertise to work exploring and identifying the knowledge, techniques, and strategies needed to maximize technology investments and achieve long-term business transformation for all types of organizations. Written for executives from all disciplines, the book highlights many of the root causes of the IT value dilemma and explains how executives can prevent and counter these issues. Readers will learn the portfolio management methods essential to achieving value. The book provides executives with the tools to: – Illuminate, assess, and improve existing practices – Design a governance structure and allocate appropriate decision rights – Ensure centralized control with decentralized execution – Increase collaboration between business-unit and IT leadership – Instill a culture of continuous improvement and innovation Executives, board members, policymakers, analysts, and the media all want to know: are companies spending too much on information technology (IT)? But the question they should ask is whether organizations are seeing sufficient value from their IT investment – the value that comes from effectively managing technology as part of overall business transformation. Many organizations don’t know how to move from managing technology to managing overall business transformation. Large-scale transformation efforts often go awry because the business leadership team and IT project teams are out of sync. In most of these cases, the organization lacks a governance method that fuses strategic management of the business, the technology, and the projects. Portfolio management is the governance method that’s needed. Strategic IT Portfolio Management describes the portfolio management governance method necessary for transformation success. This book highlights many of the root causes for the IT dilemma and explains how executives can prevent and counter these issues. Readers gain an inside look at how portfolio management can instill a culture of continuous improvement and innovation within the organization.