Enterprise Architecture

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Evaluating the Effectiveness of Reference Models in Federating Enterprise Architectures

Reference models to federate enterprise architectures across multiple agencies are investigated as a means to provide greater mission effectiveness and increased efficiencies. While heuristic and qualitative approaches to federating enterprise architectures have led to the increased use of reference models, their actual effectiveness and value have not been quantified. Federal departments and agencies are under increasing pressure to provide effective government and citizen services with improved efficiency. Enterprise architectures are used to align agencies’ strategic goals and business objectives to resources. As agencies collaborate with each other to achieve better strategic performance and resource savings, the ability to share information about their enterprise architectures is critical to their success. The expected effectiveness of reference models in federating enterprise architectures was quantified employing the classical method of expert judgment. A structured discussion instrument to evaluate reference models was developed and piloted using well-established guidelines for expert judgment. The resulting instrument was used in structured discussions with architects and engineers who are members of an architecture working group across multiple federal government agencies. Reference models were determined to be effective for federating enterprise architectures where participating agencies align their component architectures to the common taxonomy provided by the reference models.

The business does not exist! Why Enterprise Architecture is often a mission impossible

Successful application of enterprise architecture is not easy. Many books and articles have been written on the subject. They describe how alignment with ―the business‖ is essential and subsequently delve into architecture frameworks, procedures, organization, governance, and the required skill set. This article will show that in general there is no such thing as ―the business‖ and how this represents the major obstacle for successful enterprise architecture and mature IT.

Market-Driven Enterprise Architecture

Throughout the last decade, business leaders have consistently reported their top two challenges as managing change and complexity. Market-orientation and enterprise architecture are two disciplines that lend themselves to helping leaders meet such challenges. Yet, while they have gained separate momentum in academia and practice, they remain poorly integrated and suffer from resulting individual deficits. This article summarizes the findings from an exploratory study (Højsgaard 2010) of what has been entitled Market-Driven Enterprise Architecture (MDEA). Under the premise that organizations can benefit from both areas, and that they hold joint potential in maximizing business success, the MDEA is developed as a conceptual and practical integration of market-orientation and enterprise architecture. By developing the model into a measurement scale and applying it to a sample of the enterprise architecture community, empirical evidence is found for the presence of MDEA in practice, support of reliability and validity of the MDEA measurement scale, as well as positive and statistically significant relationships to business performance.

Better Business-IT Alignment Through Enterprise Architecture: An Actor-Network Theory Perspective

Enterprise architecture has attracted the attention of information systems (IS) academics as well as information technology (IT) and business professionals. While enterprise architecture has been proposed as a solution to the business-IT alignment problem, there is little theoretical basis that would explain how enterprise architecture work can lead to better alignment. Here we draw on the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to highlight the role of enterprise architecture in achieving and sustaining such alignment. Specifically, we argue that enterprise architecture work helps to achieve agreement and thus alignment of the interests of internal actors within the context of enterprise interests and inscribes such agreement into architectural artifacts. Such artifacts can then be used in negotiations with external parties, such as IT vendors, thereby protecting the interests of the enterprise. Enterprise architecture work is also likely to reduce the likelihood of members of the enterprise, such as IT staff, from forming close ties with external parties, such as IT solution vendors, at the expense of the interests of the enterprise. We argue that this would result in stronger business-IT alignment. We conclude by highlighting two important goals of enterprise architecture as viewed through the ANT lens: (1) to help achieve an alignment of interests within the enterprise, and (2) to serve as a tool for protecting the interests of the enterprise in internal and external negotiations. These in turn point to the importance of the soft skills of enterprise architects and the need for clear and readily understandable enterprise architecture artifacts.

The Frugal Enterprise Architect

In the last three years we have seen a significant focus placed on the practice of enterprise architecture, its importance to the strategic forward momentum of an organization, and the need to master the methodology, mechanics, and traceable metrics attached to the program. With books, magazine articles, and white papers highlighting the need to properly structure and invest appropriately in enterprise architecture, fledgling programs with modest budgets struggle to apply these broad but often considered „best practice‟ recommendations. Depending on corporate culture and tolerance for organizational change, senior management teams may be the toughest to convince of the value of a newer enterprise architecture program when, from their perspective, the wheels of the organization have turned smoothly for years. Lead architects with limited program budgets will need to be creative and extremely careful in their approach to developing an enterprise architecture program, but there are ways to achieve success as a frugal enterprise architect.

Auditing the Implementation of Enterprise Architecture at the Federal Railroad Administration

After several years of work, implementing enterprise architecture in the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA – a part of the US Dept. of Transportation), in Fall 2009, attention was turned to the question: How to efficiently yet comprehensively audit their implementation of enterprise architecture, to identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for future improvement? At that time, US agencies such as OMB and GAO had issued guides for reviewing (or evaluating, appraising, or auditing) government agency implementations of enterprise architecture, but these guides were not completely consistent with one another. A new, harmonizing version was being developed by GAO and was released in August 2010, containing the Enterprise Architecture Management Maturity Framework, Version 2.0 (EAMMF 2.0). This provides a management maturity framework which can permit an organization to achieve increasingly higher states of enterprise architecture management maturity. This article presents a pilot test project developed and conducted within the FRA, using the new EAMMF 2.0 elements and an audit methodology drawn loosely from the Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI®) models and its companion Standard CMMI Appraisal Method for Process Improvement (SCAMPI) SM appraisal methods. The audit methodology proved to be an efficient way to assess FRA’s efforts in enterprise architecture. Findings also show that FRA’s implementation of enterprise architecture reflects very high enterprise architecture management maturity, suggesting that FRA has positioned itself well to support future initiatives such as the US development of high- speed rail and to continue to coordinate with its many constituencies including the railroad industry, other federal agencies, state and local government railroad agencies, and the public-at-large, to realize the benefits of enterprise architecture, all while dealing with rapid change, value, agility, standards, risk, and transformation.