Enterprise Architecture

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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.

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.