Practical EA Model Development: A Case Study of An Educational Institution in Bahrain

Abstract

Organizations strive to meet their business goals in preserving a desired harmony and collaboration between its business environment and integrated ICT. At the same time, Enterprise architecture (EA), as a high ontological analysis tool, claims that organizations could directly benefit from EA efforts in enhancing knowledge and improved decision making about the organization‘s people, business processes, information, and ICT applications. Massive number of EA methodologies and frameworks assist organizations in achieving their aforementioned benefits. This paper addresses the development of an EA (baseline and a target architectural effort) analysis that enables the management of a Bahraini educational department; Information Systems Department (IS-Dep) assess its readiness for investing in a new Dashboard application. Respectively, Zachman Framework (ZFW), an Architecture Development Process (ADP), and ArchiMate modeling language were employed as an analysis tool, project methodology and a rigorous architecture description provider for the business and IT stakeholders. Results reveal that 1) The whole university is facing communication and information sharing difficulties, at which more advanced application systems, should be adopted to correct this problem. 2) Every type of data and information in the university is centralized implying that lengthy and time-consuming procedures are to be tackled. In order for the IS-Dep to meet the needs of both students and academics, the system needs to be decentralized. 3) Many services are not fully utilized, so the ISDep should utilize them.