Mental Models: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis of Theory and Methods
This paper provides an interdisciplinary synthesis of the literature that has contributed to the theoretical development and practical application of the mental model construct.
Drift into Failure
This book explores complexity theory and systems thinking to understand better how complex systems drift into failure.
Modeling Contextual Concerns in Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise Architecture approaches are used to provide rigorous descriptions of the organization-wide environment, manage the alignment of deployed services to the organization’s mission, end ensure a clear separation of the concerns addressed in an architecture. Thus, an effective Enterprise Architecture approach assists in the management of relations and dependencies of any components of the organization environment and supports the integration and evolution of the architecture. However, the quality of that approach is strongly influenced by the precision of the architecture context description, a fact which is not always recognized. This paper focuses on the architecture context description and addresses the gap between the stakeholders’concerns and the resulting architecture. Based on a combination of established references and standards, we show how an explicit integration of the architecture context into the architecture model improves the linking of concerns and key elements of the architecture vision. We apply our approach to a subject of increasing concern in the Information Systems area: longevity of information. Digital preservation is an interdisciplinary problem, but existent initiatives address it in a very domain-centric way, making it impossible to integrate documented knowledge into an overall organization architecture. We analyze several references and models and derive a description of the architecture context and a capability model that supports incremental development through an explicit distinction between systems and their capabilities. The presented approach allows not just any organization to assess their current digital preservation awareness and evolve their architectures to address this challenge, but in particular demonstrates the added value of an explicit architecture context model in an Enterprise Architecture approach.
Integrating Innovation into Enterprise Architecture Management
The ability of organizations to innovate is acknowledged as an essential capability to compete in a competitive market. This paper proposes to use enterprise architecture management as a systematic approach to innovate the enterprise. The enterprise architecture approach is based on a comprehensive architecture framework which aligns the domains of business -, application – and infrastructure architecture. The framework addresses all dimensions relevant for enterprise innovation like business mod-el, organization, processes, and technology and provides appro-priate design techniques. A comprehensive architecture development process is introduced which integrates innovation as a central element for the enter-prise architecture design. The process encompasses all activities from business vision
Business Architectures in the Public Sector: Experiences from Practice
Government agencies need to transform the way in which they are organized in order to be able to provide better services to their constituents and adapt to changes in legislation. Whereas much e-government research has a technology focus, our goal is to investigate whether business architectures can help governments to recreate agencies to make them robust in dealing with political preferences, and further, whether their adoption can guide the realization of IT-oriented enterprise architectures. In this article the concept of business architecture and its implications are analyzed by investigating the case study of the Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Services. The case demonstrates the mediating role business architectures can play between policy and strategy on the one hand, and enterprise IT architecture on the other. Business architectures help: (1) to define business domains and the events connecting them, and (2) to use principles to integrate the domains and ensure synergies. Business domains can be designed and operated independently, which enable higher levels of adaptability. Our case analyses show that the pluriformity of the political visions, public values, and actors involved and the division of responsibilities complicate the creation of a business architecture.
Where Do We Find Services in Enterprise Architectures? A Comparative Approach
In recent years, enterprise architecture (EA) has captured growing attention as a means to systematically consolidate and interrelate diverse IT artefacts in order to provide holistic decision support. Since the emergence of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), many attempts have been made to incorporate SOA artefacts in existing EA frameworks. Yet the approaches taken to achieve this goal differ substantially for the most commonly used EA frameworks to date. This paper investigates and compares five widely used EA frameworks in the way they embrace the SOA paradigm. It identifies what SOA artefacts are considered to be in the respective EA frameworks and their relative position in the overall structure. The results show that services and related artefacts are far from being well-integrated constructs in current EA frameworks. The comparison presented in this paper will support practitioners in identifying an EA framework that provides SOA support in a way that matches their requirements and will hopefully inspire the academic EA and SOA communities to work on a closer integration of these architectures.