Narrow Results

In this paper, the enterprise architecture engineering model is presented for research organizations which Academic Center for Education, Culture and Research (ACECR) has chosen as a case study. Also the Zachman framework has been used to complete the layers of enterprise architecture. By studying the research background, it was observed that most of the studies are in the field of organizational architecture technologies and the difference between this research and other studies on the implementation of organizational architecture in research organizations has not been done in previous studies. So we decided to study the layers of organizational architecture in Jihad, which is a research center. This paper has a qualitative approach as a purpose and survey-analytical as a data collection. The statistical population includes all personnel and its statistical sample includes the representatives of ACECR of East Azerbaijan province. Based on the four phases performed in accordance with the Zachman framework, the organization’s processes were identified and information related to the Zachman layers was completed. Finally, organizational, systematic and planning models for ACECR were presented. To determine the level of maturity of enterprise architecture, a questionnaire was distributed and the significant effect of layers on each other were studied. The results showed that “access to information and data”, “business processes” and “information technology” have the highest positive impact on enterprise architecture maturity, respectively.

Three core imperatives are essential for modern businesses and organizations: seamless integration of customer and operational processes, agility, and the ability to change. These imperatives are relevant in view of successfully executing strategic choices, but all too often not satisfied.

Businesses and organizations are complex adaptive socio-technical systems and can be viewed from two fundamentally different perspectives: the functional (black-box) perspective and the constructional (white-box) perspective. Management and governance of businesses and organizations regard the functional, black-box perspective, which is inherently ill-suited for addressing the imperatives mentioned. It will be argued that establishing system integration, agility and change requires a focus on the system's design, hence necessitates the constructional perspective.

The concept of architecture is considered fundamental for operationalizing the constructional perspective. Next to the more familiar notion of technology architecture, the concepts of business, organizational and information architecture are formally introduced and elucidated. Various domains within these architectures will be highlighted, whereby the importance of coherence and consistency is stressed, especially in view of the ability to change. Collectively, the four architectures are labeled Enterprise Architecture. Finally, enterprise architecture will be positioned as a crucial means for linking strategy development and execution.

This paper presents a framework for architecture alignment that can be positioned between approaches for software architecture, which concern software artefacts only, and strategic alignment models, which have a business focus. The framework is currently applied in case study research to find alignment patterns used in practice. First results presented in this paper indicate that the framework might yield an operationalization of strategic architecture alignment models. We also present an alignment pattern which shows a difference between how architectures are designed at the application level and the infrastructure level. We think this difference is significant for practical alignment models.

A coherent description of enterprise architecture provides insight, enables communication among stakeholders and guides complicated change processes. Unfortunately, so far no enterprise architecture description language exists that fully enables integrated enterprise modeling, because for each architectural domain, architects use their own modeling techniques and concepts, tool support, visualization techniques, etc. In this paper, we outline such an integrated language and we identify and study concepts that relate architectural domains. In our language, concepts for describing the relationships between architecture descriptions at the business, application, and technology levels play a central role, related to the ubiquitous problem of business-ICT alignment, whereas for each architectural domain we conform to existing languages or standards such as UML. In particular, usage of services offered by one layer to another plays an important role in relating the behaviour aspects of the layers. The structural aspects of the layers are linked through the interface concept, and the information aspects through realization relations.

Gartner advises that for enterprise architecture development to be successful, it is vital that enterprise architects ensure effective communication and also form virtual teams that create and agree on enterprise architecture content. One of the ways to achieve this is to enforce Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) during enterprise architecture creation. Guided by Design Science, we are developing a method referred to as Collaborative Evaluation of (Enterprise) Architecture Design Alternatives (CEADA) to enable CDM during enterprise architecture creation. The method attempts to resolve challenges in enterprise architecting that are caused by ineffective collaboration between enterprise architects and organizational stakeholders. Requirements for CEADA have been defined based on the causality analysis theory, the generic decision-making process, enterprise architecture frameworks (and literature), and the CDM theory. In addition, Collaboration Engineering has been used to design a collaboration process to address these requirements. Models describing the requirements and the design of the collaboration process, have been evaluated using the analytical, experimental, and observational methods. This paper discusses the implications of findings from these evaluations and presents the validated requirements for realizing CDM in enterprise architecture creation. Thus, this research generally attempts to strengthen enterprise architecting guidelines with collaborative activities, so as to enable effective execution of collaboration-dependent tasks.

Effective execution of collaborative tasks during enterprise architecture creation helps to increase stakeholders' involvement and awareness in the architecture effort. However, enterprise architecture approaches lack detailed support for collaborative tasks. In an effort to address this, an exploratory survey was conducted among enterprise architects to investigate issues associated with executing collaborative tasks during enterprise architecture creation. Accordingly, this paper discusses mainly three aspects. First, it discusses how issues that were reported in the survey can be addressed by adopting the design science research methodology to guide the development of a process or method that supports the execution of collaborative tasks in architecture creation. The developed process is principally rooted in collaboration engineering and soft systems methodology (SSM). Second, the paper discusses how the developed method can be used to supplement enterprise architecture approaches that are used in practice (e.g. TOGAF) with support for executing collaborative tasks. Third, the paper discusses key findings from evaluating the developed process in two real organizations.

Combining enterprise architecture and operational data is complex (especially when considering the actual ‘matching’ of data with enterprise architecture elements), and little has been written on how to do this. In this paper we aim to fill this gap, and propose a method to combine operational data with enterprise architecture to better support decision-making. Using such a method may result in either an enriched enterprise architecture model (which is very suitable as basis for model-based architecture analyses) or a warehouse data model where operational data is enriched with enterprise architecture metadata (which leads to more traceability by easing the retrieval and interpretation of raw data and of business analytics results). The method is illustrated by means of a case and evaluated by experts. Also, a model for mapping enterprise architecture, operational data, and time is proposed, which allows the model-based execution of new types of analyses.

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a description of an enterprise from an integrated business and IT perspective. Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is a management practice embracing all the management processes related to EA aiming to improve business and IT alignment. EAM is typically described as a sequential four-step process: (i) document the current state, (ii) describe the desired future state, (iii) develop the transition plan and (iv) implement the plan. This traditional four-step approach to EAM essentially defines the modern understanding of EA. Based on a literature review, this paper demonstrates that this four-step approach to EAM, though practiced by some companies, is inadequate as a model explaining the EAM phenomenon in general. As a substitute, this paper synthesizes the generic conceptual model of EAM providing a more realistic conceptualization of EAM describing it as a decentralized network of independent but interacting processes, artifacts and actors.

This paper examines three converging trends in the public sector in the early years of the 21st century: the loss of critical knowledge due to large numbers of retiring government workers, the increasing demand for information and communications technology needed to maintain growth in the scale and scope of e-government, and the requirement to parlay investments in enterprise architecture into effective knowledge management and service delivery efficiency. It includes brief historical reviews of each of these trends, their implementation, and how they are being integrated into initiatives for transforming governments from reactive, bureaucratic systems to visionary, proactive, market-oriented learning organisations. The paper concludes with a discussion of the role played by changes in public sector organisational cultures in successfully addressing these three trends and achieving goals of transformation.

This paper describes the information technology (IT) organization modeling and assessment tool (ITOMAT) and how it can be used for IT governance decision making. The ITOMAT consists of an enterprise architecture metamodel that describes IT organizations. Further, ITOMAT contains a Bayesian network for making predictions on how changes to IT organization models will affect the IT governance performance as perceived by business stakeholders. Thorough case studies at 20 different companies have been conducted in order to calibrate the network. Finally, the paper describes a case study where ITOMAT was used to analyze the future impact of two IT organization change scenarios in a medium-sized engineering company.

Systems theory is one of the most important and well-used concept to explain the phenomenon in social sciences. Therefore, systems science plays an important role in explaining many of the phenomena in information systems research. Enterprise Systems (ES), Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) and Enterprise Architecture (EA) are three such emerging technologies in which systems’ perspective plays an important role in explaining the growth and development of these technologies. However, there is lack of literature that illustrates the development and the impact of systems science in these three technologies. This research carefully collects and studies 106 existing literature in the field of ES, EA and EIS, and a summary review of all the latest developments in the ways systems theory has been implemented to these three fields as well as different areas of these three technologies. In the conclusion, three future trends are concluded from the review.

The demand for business structures that respond more quickly to changes imposed by a competitive market makes digital transformation (DT) the driver of more agile and cost-effective production systems. From such perspective derives the following question: How does literature organize the main strategies demanded by the DT challenge in an organization? Based on a systematic literature review, this study aims to identify and analyze DT’s main characteristics, leading to the development of a framework to support its understanding from planning to execution. The Digital Transformation – Planning to Execution Framework (DT-P2EF) is divided into two conceptual blocks. The first block focuses on the DT planning, including the organizational requirements of an enterprise architecture (EA), the organizational characteristics based on the organizational ambidexterity (OA) introduction, and the barriers that may impact the DT, according to Enterprise Interoperability (EI). The second block of the framework regards the DT execution, the translation of the strategy defined and the performance monitoring of the DT in the organization. The DT-P2EF consists in identifying business influence factors and dimensions for a better understanding and development of the DT journey in enterprises.