Enterprise Architecture Discipline Research Articles

The theoretical basis of enterprise architecture: A critical review and taxonomy of relevant theories

Enterprise architecture is a collection of artifacts describing various aspects of an organization from an integrated business and IT perspective. Practicing enterprise architecture in organizations implies using these artifacts to facilitate information systems planning and improve business and IT alignment. Despite its long history, the enterprise architecture discipline still remains largely atheoretical and lacks a solid theoretical basis. Based on our previous empirical studies of the practical usage of enterprise architecture artifacts in multiple organizations and broad literature analysis, this conceptual article identifies and discusses in detail 10 theories that can be considered key for understanding how an enterprise architecture practice works: actor-network theory, boundary objects theory, cognitive fit theory, communities of practice theory, decision-making theories, information processing theory, knowledge management theory, management fashion theory, media richness theory, and uncertainty principle. Taken together, these theories offer a comprehensive theoretical view of an enterprise architecture practice explaining the role of enterprise architecture artifacts, their usability, and participation of stakeholders and, therefore, may constitute a theoretical basis of the entire enterprise architecture discipline. Although this article does not elaborate on any of these theories, it brings these theories to light, establishes their critical importance for comprehending an enterprise architecture practice, and positions them as central to the enterprise architecture discourse. Each of these theories can be leveraged by enterprise architecture scholars in their future studies for analyzing enterprise architecture practices through respective theoretical lenses. This article intends to provide fresh theoretical insights on enterprise architecture, spark new waves of theoretical enterprise architecture research, and contribute to the development of a sound theoretical foundation for the enterprise architecture discipline.

Implementation of a continuous delivery pipeline for enterprise architecture model evolution

The discipline of enterprise architecture (EA) is an established approach to model and manage the interaction of business processes and IT in an organization. Thereby, the EA model as a central artifact of EA is subject to a continuous evolution caused by multiple sources of changes. The continuous evolution requires a lot of effort in controlling and managing the evolution of the EA model. This is especially true when merging the induced changes from different sources in the EA model. Additionally, the lack of tool and automation support makes this a very time-consuming and error-prone task. The evolutionary character and the automated quality assessment of artifacts is a well-known challenge in the software development domain as well. To meet these challenges, the discipline of continuous delivery (CD) has emerged to be very useful. The evolution of EA model artifacts shows similarities to the evolution of software artifacts. Therefore, we leveraged practices of CD to practices of EA maintenance. Thus, we created a conceptual framework for automated EA model maintenance. The concepts were realized in a first prototype and were evaluated in a fictitious case study against equivalence classes based on EA model metrics and a set of several requirements for automated EA model maintenance from research. Overall, the concepts prove to be a promising basis for further refinement, implementation, and evaluation in research in an industrial context.

DESERV IT: A Method for Devolving Service Tasks in IT Services

Nowadays, IT operations devolve many tasks in IT services to internal customers (i.e., IT self-service). The rationale for this service task devolvement is often to reduce the IT personnel’s workload. However, prior research has shown that IT operations often fail to achieve this goal. Existing methods for modeling and analyzing services fall short of supporting service providers in identifying and specifying service tasks suitable to be devolved to (internal) customers. This paper presents, therefore, the first method for devolving service tasks in IT services (DESERV IT). DESERV IT is a compound of four method components encompassing a joint meta-model, a visual notation for modeling IT services, and procedural recommendations. The DESERV IT meta-model extends the meta-model of service blueprinting by means of concepts required to analyze service task devolvement. DESERV IT is evaluated in four evaluation episodes. The results of the evaluation episodes show that DESERV IT is perceived as effective, useful, complete, and generalizable by experts in the IT service management and enterprise architecture discipline. This paper contributes to enterprise modeling by demonstrating the feasibility of DESERV IT in an example case and describing DESERV IT’s evolution during the evaluation episodes. DESERV IT supports practitioners (e.g., request fulfillment managers) in modeling and analyzing IT services.

CORRIGENDUM to An exploration of the many ways to approach the discipline of enterprise architecture

CORRIGENDUM to An exploration of the many ways to approach the discipline of enterprise architecture

The architectures of data and information: Their confounded confusion

Background: Even though it is well documented in the academic domain, including various English dictionaries, that data and information are not the same thing, with the latter being a refinement of the former, many people within organisations and academic environments continue to loosely and interchangeably use these terms. This is a challenge that extends to the enterprise architecture discipline, which has an impact on how the domains of data and information architectures are defined, developed and implemented in many organisations. Objectives: The challenge leads to misunderstanding of both technical and business requirements, as well as confusion about the differentiation between data and information architectures. This challenge affects the accomplishment of either data or information in an organisation. This is caused by the fact that data is referred to as information, meaning it has been refined, which is incorrect, and therefore affects requirements. Additionally, this challenge influences the organisational structure and the development of employees’ career. Thus, the objective of this study was to examine the implication of practice in the loose and interchangeable use of the terms, ‘data’ and ‘information’, within an organisation. Method: Based on this objective, the interpretivist stance was employed in the study. Qualitative data was gathered and the hermeneutics approach was employed in the analysis. Results: From the analysis, a solution is proposed to halt further misconstruction of the architectures, and avoid the confusing challenges it has for organisations. Conclusion: The study reveals what we need to know about the confounded confusion between data and information architectures. The differentiation between the two concepts can be of importance to professionals in the field of information systems and technologies as well as academics.

Enterprise architecture and enterprise architecture artifacts: Questioning the old concept in light of new findings

Enterprise architecture is a description of an enterprise from an integrated business and IT perspective intended to bridge the communication gap between business and IT stakeholders and improve business and IT alignment. Enterprise architecture consists of multiple different artifacts providing certain views of an organization and the available enterprise architecture literature offers a number of comprehensive lists of artifacts that can be used as part of an enterprise architecture practice. However, these lists of enterprise architecture artifacts were never validated empirically and the practical usage of different artifacts still remains largely unexplored. Based on a comprehensive empirical analysis of enterprise architecture artifacts used in 27 diverse organizations, this study identifies the list of 24 common artifacts that proved useful in practice and describes in detail their usage and purpose. Although this study does not attempt to theorize on the findings, it makes a significant empirical contribution to the enterprise architecture discipline. In particular, this study (1) provides the first consistent list of enterprise architecture artifacts that actually proved useful in organizations, (2) offers the first available systematic description of their usage, (3) questions the common view of enterprise architecture as a set of business, information, applications and technology architectures and (4) questions the widely accepted conceptualization of enterprise architecture as a set of the current state, future state and transition roadmap. This study provides compelling empirical evidence in favor of reconceptualizing enterprise architecture and calls for further research in this direction.

A Systematic Review of Business-IT Alignment Research With Enterprise Architecture

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 business-IT alignment (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.

An exploration of the many ways to approach the discipline of enterprise architecture

Despite growing interest in enterprise architecture (EA) around the world in recent years, a lack of common understanding is frequently described by EA researchers/practitioners. We conducted a sys...

Enterprise Architecture: What Did We Study?

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a description of an enterprise from an integrated business and IT perspective intended to improve business and IT alignment, and is used in the majority of large companies. However, despite that EA was established as an independent discipline long ago, a commonly accepted “big picture” in EA research is still missing. As a result, the scope of the EA discipline is vague, the extent of diversity in EA publications is poorly understood and the progression of the EA research stream over time is unclear. In this paper I conduct a comprehensive EA literature review covering 1075 publications aiming to structure, clarify and consolidate the whole EA research stream. I analyze the distribution of the EA research stream by time, source, research methodology and attitude, code all the issues discussed in EA publications into 42 narrow EA-related topics and 11 broader themes, establish the conceptual relationship between them and present a picture of the EA discipline “on a page”. Moreover, I classify all EA-related topics into four categories according to their lifecycles helping future EA researchers to better understand the evolution of the EA discipline and make the maximum contribution to it.

Critical Questions in Enterprise Architecture Research

The current enterprise architecture (EA) theory originates from the Business Systems Planning (BSP) methodology initiated by IBM in the 1960s and describes EA as a comprehensive blueprint of an enterprise organized according to a certain framework and describing the current state, the desired future state and the roadmap for transition between them. However, in this paper I demonstrate that the current EA theory poses more questions than answers and is, arguably, in an unsatisfactory state. This paper highlights the critical questions in EA research and is intended to spark further conversation in the EA research community. All the formulated questions address the fundamental aspects of the current EA theory that are critically important for the whole EA discipline. Although this paper does not propose any answers to these questions, it makes a non-theoretical contribution to the EA discipline by critically evaluating the current EA theory, provoking new thoughts and stimulating further research that will substantially alter the EA discipline in the future.

Enterprise engineering and management at the crossroads

The article provides an overview of the challenges and the state of the art of the discipline of Enterprise Architecture (EA), with emphasis on the challenges and future development opportunities of the underlying Information System (IS), and its IT implementation, the Enterprise Information System (EIS). The first challenge is to overcome the narrowness of scope of present practice in IS and EA, and re-gain the coverage of the entire business on all levels of management, and a holistic and systemic coverage of the enterprise as an economic entity in its social and ecological environment. The second challenge is how to face the problems caused by complexity that limit the controllability and manageability of the enterprise as a system. The third challenge is connected with the complexity problem, and describes fundamental issues of sustainability and viability. Following from the third, the fourth challenge is to identify modes of survival for systems, and dynamic system architectures that evolve and are resilient to changes of the environment in which they live. The state of the art section provides pointers to possible radical changes to models, methodologies, theories and tools in EIS design and implementation, with the potential to solve these grand challenges.

Enterprise Architecture Ontology for Supply ChainMaintenance and Restoration of the Sikorsky’s UH-60 Helicopter

Ontologies have emerged as an important tool in the Enterprise architecture discipline to provide the theoretical foundations for designing and representing the enterprise as a whole or a specific area or domain, in a scientific fashion. This paper examines the domain of maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) of the Sikorsky UH-60 helicopter involving multiple enterprises, and represents it through an ontology using the OWL Language and Protégé tool. The resulting ontology gives a formal and unambiguous model/representation of the MRO domain that can be used by multiple parties to arrive at a common shared conceptualization of the MRO domain. The ontology is designed to be conformant to ISO 13030 or the Product Life Cycle Support Standard (PLCS) standard, hence representing the state of being as per this standard especially at the interfaces between enterprises while incorporating existing reality to the greatest possible extent within the enterprises. As a result the ontology can be used to design Information Systems (IS) and their interfaces in all enterprises engaged in MRO to alleviate some of the issues present in the MRO area and to support business intelligence efforts.

Enterprise architecture analysis with extended influence diagrams

The discipline of enterprise architecture advocates the use of models to support decision-making on enterprise-wide information system issues. In order to provide such support, enterprise architect...