Volume 8

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Making use of a Target Technical Architecture to Support Acquisition Business Decisions

Enterprise architecture (EA) documents current conditions, future visions, and the transition plan between them. It pertains to and encompasses one or all of the following: programs, offices, segments, solutions, departments, lines of business, and agencies. IT acquisition management (ITAM) includes the set of tasks required to accomplish the directed and funded efforts to provide a new, improved, or continuing information system or services capability to satisfy a business need. Thus, an EA contains business operation information for decision support and communication and informs decision-makers about what technology to acquire and when. This article illustrates how a technical architecture can both provide a clear picture of the technical goals that lie ahead for the enterprise, as well as providing decision support to selecting and acquiring a product that will help satisfy the organizational requirements and scheduling needs.

Book Review: Managed Evolution

Michael Linke reviews Managed Systems: A Strategy for Very Large Information Systems by Stephan Murer and Bruno Bonati.

SEA Change: How Sustainable EA Enables Business Success in Times of Disruptive Change

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a key tool to help businesses transform themselves to meet changing business challenges. To do so, however, architectural methods must themselves be adapted to focus less on technology per se and more on how these technologies enable the business to survive and thrive over the long term—to be sustainable—in the shifting, uncertain business context. We call this shift to Sustainable Enterprise Architecture (SEA) a “SEA change”. The practice of SEA differs from the usual practice of EA in a number of ways. Sustainable architecting emphasizes the long-term perspective, focusing on how the enterprise can identify and respond effectively to a range of strategic disruptions. It is based on systems thinking; is continuous, iterative, and adaptive; and calls for integrated strategic planning, architecting, governance, and learning. It considers sustainability the primary system quality and organizes other system qualities in support of sustainability. The enterprise’s approach to sustainability is recorded in a formal sustainability architecture, which describes the threats to sustainability in the business context and defines sustainability goals, models, principles, policies, and standards to address them. It pays close attention to strategic resources and the pragmatic integration of societal, economic, and environmental considerations. It recognizes that sustainable architecting is a cultural change, and provides a set of essential checklists to guide that change.

Maturity Matters: Generate Value from Enterprise Architecture

This two-part article is an introduction to MIT’s EA maturity research. This first article[1], introduces a series of research studies at MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research, including survey results from 2004, 2007, and 2010. In the second article, in the next number of JEA, the findings from the 2011-2012 update of the research will be presented.