Abstract
This article presents the findings of research that was conducted amongst Enterprise Architecture (EA) practitioners in the South African financial services sector. Due to the duration and cost implications of EA projects, factors that contribute to the success and failure of EA initiatives need to be investigated and identified. The research was largely based on a similar international study that was conducted by Schekkerman (2004b). A number of aspects of EA were investigated, including the place of EA in organisational and strategic governance, the EA architects, practices and processes, as well as the measurement of EA initiatives. Key findings from the study were that South African companies surveyed demonstrated lower levels of maturity in their approaches to the management of EA practices and processes; also identified were significant differences in the approach in South African respondents compared to international studies with respect to ownership of EA initiatives and the types of EA frameworks and modelling techniques in use.
Highlights
This research had a focus on companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) in the financial services sector in South Africa (SA) and their use and involvement in Enterprise Architecture (EA)
The first few questions of the questionnaire dealt with the categories of the organisations who participated in this research as well as the size of their Information Technology (IT) departments
Five of the six companies were very large with one company having over 50 000 people working in the organisation and an IT department of more than 1 000 people
Summary
This research had a focus on companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) in the financial services sector in South Africa (SA) and their use and involvement in Enterprise Architecture (EA). Hagan (2004:12) offered a definition of EA from a legal perspective noting that the E-Government Act of 2002 (Public Law (PL) 107–347) states that Enterprise Architecture means: ‘A strategic information asset base, which defines the mission; the information necessary to perform the mission; the technologies necessary to perform the mission; and the transitional processes for implementing new technologies in response to changing needs; and includes: a baseline architecture; a target architecture; and a sequencing plan.’. Even accepting these perspectives, the definition chosen for the current study comes from Schekkerman (2004a). IFEAD has been most active in the past three years in terms of conducting a survey of trends in EA (Schekkerman, 2004b, 2005), and it was the IFEAD 2004 survey which provided the background for this research project
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