Enterprise Architecture

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Getting More out of Government Enterprise Architecture

The achievement of business value in organizations has been attributed to a higher Enterprise Architecture (EA) maturity level. In attempting to achieve business value, managing performance is necessary because it acts as the sensor to an organization’s management control system. While the Government of Ontario (GO) deserves recognition for instituting corporate governance to ensure its information and information technology (I&IT) initiatives are strategically justified and the proposed solutions are architecturally sound, IT governance goes beyond that. To unlock value from IT investments, the COBIT framework advocates having an internal control system, which measures achievements, evaluates efforts, and signals problem areas, so that an organization deploys its resources and processes appropriately to minimize deviations from desired values. This article presents the case for GO’s EA program, as a means to help fulfill IT governance’s dual- goal of risk management and value creation, to go beyond the alignment and integration decisions to help make EA practices more credible.

Rational Systems Design for Health Information Systems in Low-income Countries: An Enterprise Architecture Approach

Low-income countries with their funding and implementing partners are increasingly recognizing health information systems (HIS) as an essential way to strengthen and support health systems. There is tremendous potential for innovations in information and communication technologies to assist health managers, health workers, and patients. Yet individual technologies and software applications are often developed without specifying how they will interact and communicate with existing and future information systems. Furthermore, they are developed without giving adequate attention to the needs the information system is supposed to address, resulting in software applications that do not effectively meet user needs. There is a lack of documented systematic methodology for gathering and documenting requirements for developing HIS. This article introduces a systematic, architected, and rational approach (SARA) for the design and development of health information systems. SARA, based on an Enterprise Architecture (EA) approach, represents a portfolio of practices, tools, and methods that can be easily and appropriately adapted and applied in the design phase of health information system development. This article will present early efforts to develop this portfolio including lessons learned from applying SARA in Tanzania.

Processes of Sense-Making and Systems Thinking in Government EA Planning

This purpose of this article is to investigate the systemic properties of Enterprise Architecture Planning (EAP) in the Australian government sector. Based on a case study of the Land and Property Management Authority of New South Wales, the article examines and outlines the crucial necessity for including systems thinking, systems learning, and organizational sense-making in Enterprise Architecture (EA) theory and planning. The main argument is based on qualitative research into the limitations of capturing and modeling organizations using EA methodologies and modeling approaches. The EA discipline, including its tools and methodologies, relies on the metaphor of engineering the enterprise and building stable taxonomies of knowledge and process. The practical reality that e-government programs are facing is technical, sociological, and messy. However, EA tends to operate within an engineering metaphor that assumes stability, predictability, and control. Here, the author highlights the necessity of an alternative, less positivist approach to EA planning in order to understand and articulate the tacit knowledge dimensions and messy, wicked problems of organizational life. Soft systems thinking, socio-technical theory, and sense-making are introduced as theoretical and practical frames to overcome these limitations and produce a better, more viable and realistic model of planning in government enterprises. These concepts are finally amalgamated into a general, integrative model of EA planning.

Governance of Enterprise Transformation and the Different Faces of Enterprise Architecture Management

Today, enterprises more than ever find themselves confronted with a constant need to transform themselves to better cope with current pressures and to prepare for future opportunities and challenges. Enterprise architecture management plays a crucial role in that context. It may not only aid in shaping the future enterprise, but it may also facilitate subsequent transformation governance. Based on the perception of enterprise architecture management as both a strategic and an operational exercise, this article distinguishes between four general modes of architectural transformation governance and presents the different faces of enterprise architecture management prevalent in these modes. In particular, this involves solution architecture, roadmapping, and business architecture activities.

Delivering Business Value Through Enterprise Architecture

There is a substantial interest and investment in enterprise architecture worldwide, exemplified by the number of enterprise architecture-related professional bodies, consulting services, frameworks, methodologies, and the increasing prevalence of full-time enterprise architecture teams. It may seem surprising in this context, therefore, that the value of enterprise architecture is still poorly understood. Organizations cite difficulties in justifying their enterprise architecture investments and anecdotal evidence suggests that the existence and funding of the enterprise architecture function is often based more on the beliefs of the incumbent management team than on demonstrated value. Although there is no shortage of enterprise architecture benefit claims, explanations of why and how enterprise architecture leads to the proposed benefits are fragmented and incomplete. This article aims to take a step towards improving the understanding of the value of enterprise architecture by focusing on how it leads to organizational benefits. Through a careful review of the existing practitioner and academic literature, the article consolidates knowledge on enterprise architecture benefits and refines the explanations by drawing on relevant IS and management theory. The resultant EA Benefits Model (EABM) proposes that enterprise architecture leads to organizational benefits through its impact on four key benefit enablers: Organizational Alignment, Information Availability, Resource Portfolio Optimization, and Resource Complementarity. The article concludes with a discussion of some potential avenues for future research, which could build on the findings of this study.

Context-Awareness in Collaboration Architecture: A Conceptual Model for an Enterprise

Collaboration is essential within an organization to connect the right group of people to share knowledge and solve business problems. As enterprises strive to deploy a collaboration platform to capture and distribute ―collective user value‖, they now face another challenge – how to make this platform efficient and productive. This article discusses the role of context-awareness within a collaboration framework. It outlines how a collaboration platform that is aware of the context for collaboration will have capabilities of adapting the collaboration experience. Outlining attributes that define context for enterprise collaboration, we have built a conceptual delivery platform for collaboration services. We present four architecture principles that would enable a collaboration platform to be context-aware. A key consideration of this article is to include business processes within the realm of enterprise collaboration.