Although there were many comparison literatures of EA frameworks, these literature use qualitative criteria based on intuitive practitioner’s experience. The paper first defines 36 concrete features of EA frameworks using six categories and six interrogatives. Then we concretely compare typical EA frameworks based on the key features. The result shows the easiness and concreteness of the proposed EA comparison framework.
In the current business era, it is crucial for an organization to understand the rapidly changing environment of today. To swiftly respond to the changing environment, an organization must provide enterprise integration (EI) not only internally, but also externally, with its customers and suppliers. Many approaches and technologies have been proposed to facilitate EI – however, due to its complexity, integration has remained a continuous challenge in organizations. One of the major integration obstacles is maintaining architectural descriptions of the organization. Architectural descriptions, or Enterprise Architecture (EA), provides a comprehensive view of all the organizational entities and their relationships to achieve an organization’s strategic goals. Many studies have referred to EA as a solution to facilitate EI in organizations. However, developing EA is not easy to achieve. This PhD dissertation aims to facilitate integration projects by approaching EA obstacles from a social and organizational perspective. The main research question is What is the role of EA and its obstacles in EI? A qualitative and interpretive research approach is applied in this dissertation. The data was collected through interviews with practitioners from 17 large organizations and analyzed using the Grounded Theory method. The study first investigates the EI obstacles and identifies EA maintenance as a major obstacle in EI projects. After identifying the EA obstacles, the dissertation further investigates them to understand the issues in EA development that prevent EA from being efficient. By investigating the obstacles in EA development, this research shows that if not addressed properly beforehand, the obstacles follow EA through the development process. Most of the identified obstacles are social and organizational issues. The results indicate a ‘lack of communication and collaboration’ as the root obstacle in EA development that can address most of the other obstacles. Revisiting the data from a communication and collaboration point of view, the results reveal ‘organizational culture’ and ‘clarity in EA development process’ as additional causes of the lack of communication and collaboration in EA development. Furthermore, ‘personnel’s distrust’ and ‘organization loses its competitive edge’ are identified as additional effects of the lack of communication and collaboration in EA development. Finally, this study provides some recommendations to facilitate EA development for researchers and practitioners.
Because of the dynamic environments of business and IT, achieving any alignment between the two fields has become challenging. In view of its multiple viewpoints and artifacts, the discipline of Enterprise Architecture (EA) is often regarded as an effective methodology to deal with BITA issues, and thus has attracted plenty of research. This article conducts a systematic literature review of BITA research using EA. Six questions are answered through 5W1H (When, Who, What, Why, Where, How) analysis. These questions aim to acquire a thorough understanding of BITA from the perspective of EA, to discover weak points in the status quo, and to identify future research directions.
Business ecosystems are gaining more relevance both in research and in practice. The analysis of business ecosystems is thereby a data intense process. To better understand the current state-of-the-practice within enterprises addressing the analysis of business ecosystem we conducted an online survey asking participants about their division of labor, collection, documentation and processing of business ecosystem related data. 52 experts from mainly German based companies completed the questionnaire stating, inter alia, that the main data sources in use are internal company information sources and online search engines, and additionally that the time-consuming process of collecting and documenting business ecosystem related information is perceived as a major challenge in the context of business ecosystem analysis.
