Issue 3

While statistical indicators point to increased productivity and excess capacity from our current workforce, other sources caution against assuming any of that dynamic is sustainable over the next few years. Managing our way through an investment-averse business climate since 2001, significant labor reductions since 2007, and expected baby boomer retirement after 2010, we need to prepare our enterprise for significant cultural and environmental change. Though “running lean” is the new expectation for managing our businesses, we may be transposing expectations for current productivity levels with future state capabilities as the economy improves. Enterprise Architects will serve a unique role in helping our organizations navigate their way out of recession and into a sustainable growth model during the next economic recovery.

Identifying, gathering, and maintaining information on the current, planned, and target states of the architecture of an enterprise is one major challenge of enterprise architecture (EA) management. A multitude of approaches towards EA management are proposed in literature greatly differing regarding the underlying perception of EA management and the description of the function for performing EA management. The aforementioned plurality of methods and models can be interpreted as an indicator for the low maturity of the research area or as an inevitable consequence of the diversity of the enterprises under consideration pointing to the enterprise-specificity of the topic. In this article, we use a knowledge management perspective to analyze selected EA management approaches from literature. Thereby, we elicit constituents, which should be considered in every EA management function from the knowledge management cycle proposed by Probst. Based on the analysis results, we propose future research topics for the area of EA management.

Enterprise architecture (EA) is based on the principle that integrating strategic, business, and technology planning optimizes the use of information resources across non-technical disciplines and organizational lines. It offers a practical ability to make technical architecture a reflection of business intent. Achieving this top-down effect requires a clear entry point into EA for strategic decisions and efficient communication that translates strategic ideas into the EA components that drive on-going system development. Language differences along the architectural progression are barriers to implementing an EA program as a strategic initiative. The term friction captures the effect of language gaps on the quality of communication throughout the scope of EA. Friction is a primary determinant of the relevance of information-based capabilities to operational performance and its corresponding business outcomes. Minimizing friction is a primary goal of EA governance, achieved by a combination of EA repository assessment, tool selection, and methodology integration that harmonizes business intent across EA related disciplines. Analyzing the transformations that occur at communication boundaries suggests ways to overcome friction. Most possible solutions are limited by the fundamentally different skills required of specialized practitioners on either side of a boundary. Short of converting strategists into enterprise architects or vice versa the most practical compromise lies in adopting two dominant characteristics when expressing business strategy, tactics, and capabilities– a high degree of structure and semantics that require minimal translation along the system development path. This article defines friction and identifies its sources in an EA program. It outlines techniques for assessing the friction profile of an EA repository. Based on this profile, it suggests EA governance techniques that reduce friction and thus improve the usefulness of EA artifacts as enablers of effective communication along the strategy – implementation continuum. This article also identifies service strategy and design as an existing, mature, and technically relevant discipline that exhibits low friction across a long span of EA activities. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) makes a detailed and compelling case that business service management is a primary strategic asset1. The corresponding service management lifecycle provides a useful pattern for assessing the efficiency of transforming a business service into its architectural counterpart in the form of service oriented architecture (SOA). This indicates that service orientation is a useful point of departure for design of a tangible strategy for minimizing friction in an EA program.