Principles in an Enterprise Architecture Context
Key concepts in enterprise architecture include concerns, principles, models, views, and frameworks. While most of these concepts have received ample attention in research, the concept of principles has not been studied much yet. In this article, we therefore specifically focus on the role of principles in the field of enterprise architecture, where we position enterprise architecture as a means to direct enterprise transformations. In practice, many different types of architecture principles are used. At the same time, principles are referred to by different names, including architecture principles, design principles, and IT policies. The primary goal of this article is, therefore, to arrive at a conceptual framework to more clearly clarify and position these different types. The article starts with a discussion on enterprise architecture as a means to govern enterprise transformation. This provides a framework to position the different types of principles, and highlight their roles in enterprise transformations.
A Process Driven Approach to Modelling Leadership
This article proposes a new approach for defining and categorizing the activity of leadership with a strong orientation towards the definition and primacy of management and strategy layers of activity when seeking to attempt to understand and design new and emerging patterns within the enterprise. The specific model type within the emerging Next-Gen EA framework that talks to the concept of leadership is that of Organizational Capability that lies within the Business Function Layer. This new functional category also links to subordinate process models which define the specific activities from which the function is characterized. Together, the Function Type and the underlying process flows can be grouped to be termed a Reference Model of Organizational Behavior (RMOB). Together, this functional component and supporting process flows are fully conformant with the requirements for Process Reference Models, as prescribed by ISO ISO/IEC TR 24774:2010 and ISO/IEC 15504: 2004. This RMOB therefore has all the strength and flexibility of a robust software engineering tool, yet it is coupled with generic ability to describe a core function within the modern organization that has, to date, defied rigorous or quantifiable definition. This ability to describe, model, and capture „capability sets‟ supported by underlying process, information, and technologies within an organization fulfils one of the key determining factors within the Next-Gen EA framework, namely the ability to model the modern organization at all levels and add further sophistication to the model types provided by enterprise architecture in the quest to solve senior management business and strategy problems.
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.