Business models and information systems for sustainable development

Businesses are expected to explore market opportunities in the area of sustainable development, thus contributing to finding solutions aiming at sustainable quality of life. This will require adaptation and innovation of business models and information systems, with challenges of particular interest to the business modeling and software design community. This paper briefly discusses two relevant topics in this respect, namely (i) goal and value modeling, and (ii) model-driven development. We mention existing work that can be taken as a starting point for addressing sustainability issues, and we make some observations that may be taken into account when extending existing work

Alignment Framework in Enterprise Architecture Development

The challenge of business-IT alignment, the increasing complexity of organizations’ operations and supporting organization transformation are the main drivers for organizations to adopt Enterprise Architecture (EA) concept. Despite the rapid interest in the EA, organizations are facing challenge to realize organizational value out of it. This challenge can be rooted to the lack of the stakeholders needs and concerns consideration in the final developed architecture which result in low utilization or no acceptance of EA. The enterprise architects and the stakeholders are the main players in the development phase of EA. Literature highlighted the need of alignment framework that can support the enterprise architects to align the development of EA with the stakeholders’ expectations. Furthermore, there is a scarcity of academic studies that shed the light on the alignment between the enterprise architects and the stakeholders during the development of EA. Hence, the purpose of this study is to develop a framework that supports the alignment between the enterprise architects and the stakeholders in EA development to ensure a mutual understanding and agreement. The study is guided by the interpretive paradigm to address the research gap through the utilization of a qualitative methodology. The research is using the case study approach to build in-depth understanding of the relationship between the enterprise architects and stakeholders in EA development. The understanding from Multiple Perspectives Theory is used to develop the initial research model to provide initial guidance in data collection and analysis. Currently, the research is at the analysis stage of case study data. The developed framework is expected to support the practitioners in the EA development by uncovering the factors influencing the alignment between the enterprise architects and the stakeholders during the development process. Additionally, the study is building a comprehensive understanding on how the enterprise architects consider the stakeholders needs and concerns in the development of EA

Aligning enterprise architecture with strategic planning

Strategic planning improves both the financial and behavioral performance of an enterprise. It helps the enterprise set priorities, focus capabilities and resources, strengthen operations, ensure that stakeholders are working toward common goals and assess and adjust the enterprise’s direction. Strategic planning is currently not explicitly represented in EA, although it motivates enterprise architecture choices. This paper studies strategic planning approaches and discusses their potential relation with EA. The paper focuses on how EA can contribute to strategic planning, discussing requirements on EA extensions to support strategic planning and pointing to solutions. A general approach to support strategic planning using EA should mutually benefit the practices of strategic planning and EA

Using ontologies for enterprise architecture analysis

Abstract-Enterprise architecture aligns business and information technology through the management of different elements and domains. An architecture description encompasses a wide and heterogeneous spectrum of areas, such as business processes, metrics, application components, people and technological infrastructure. Views express the elements and relationships of one or more domains from the perspective of specific system concerns relevant to one or more of its stakeholders. As a result, each view needs to be expressed in the description language that best suits its concerns. However, enterprise architecture languages tend to advocate a rigid "one-model fits all" approach where an all-encompassing description language describes several architectural domains. This approach hinders extensibility and adds complexity to the overall description language. On the other hand, integrating multiple models raises several challenges at the level of model coherence, consistency and traceability. Moreover, EA models should be computable so that the effort involved in their analysis is manageable. This work advocates the employment of ontologies and associated techniques in EA for contributing to the solving of the aforementioned issues. Thus, a proposal is made comprising an extensible architecture that consists of a core domain-independent ontology that can be extended through the integration of domain-specific ontologies focusing on specific concerns. The proposal is demonstrated through a real-world evaluation scenario involving the analysis of the models according to the requirements of the scenario stakeholders

The proposed alignment framework in enterprise architecture development for the Omani public sector

The misalignment between Enterprise Architecture (EA) development and stakeholders’ goals plays a vital role in the low acceptance of EA in organizations and governments. Literature has highlighted the need for an alignment framework to support enterprise architects to align the development process of EA with the stakeholders’ goals. Hence, this research developed an alignment framework to align the EA development process with the stakeholders to produce an agreed architecture that supports the architects. Multiple Perspectives Theory (MPT) was used to develop a preliminary research model that provided the initial guidance in data collection and analysis. The research employed a qualitative case study approach to build an in-depth understanding of EA development process, enterprise architects and stakeholders’ roles, as well as the factors influencing the alignment between them. The Government Architecture Framework (GAF) of the Omani public sector was used as the case study that included GAF documentation review, and interviews with architects and stakeholders who participated in the development of GAF. The findings showed that twelve alignment factors influenced the development of GAF which are standardization, development scope, principles, governance, top management support, culture, commitment, awareness, communication, value of EA, change management capability and experience. These factors were used as the base to develop the alignment framework followed by a focus group session with GAF architects was organized to validate the final framework. As a conclusion, the study has shown that the alignment framework provides a comprehensive understanding for practitioners and academicians about the factors and their influences at each EA development step

Representing Organizational Structures in Enterprise Architecture: an Ontology-based Approach

Enterprise Architecture (EA) promotes the establishment of a holistic view of the structure and way of working of an organization. One of the aspects covered in EA is associated with the organizations active structure, which concerns who undertakes organizational activities. Several approaches have been proposed in order to provide a means for representing enterprise architecture, among which ARIS, RM-ODP, UPDM and ArchiMate. Despite the acceptance by the community, existing approaches focus on different purposes, have limitations on their conceptual scopes and some have no real world semantics well-defined. Besides modeling approaches, many ontology approaches have been proposed in order to describe the active structure domain, including the ontologies in the SUPER Project, TOVE, Enterprise Ontology and W3C Org Ontology. Although specified for semantic grounding and meaning negotiation, some of proposed approaches have specific purposes and limited coverage. In addition, some of them are not defined using formal languages and others are specified using languages without well-defined semantics. This work presents a well-founded reference ontology for the organizational domain. The organizational reference ontology presented covers the basic aspects discussed in the organizational literature, such as division of labor, social relations and classification of structuring units. Further, it also encompasses the organizational aspects defined in existing approaches, both modeling and ontology approaches. The resulting ontology is specified in OntoUML and extends the social concepts of UFO-C

Extensibility of Enterprise Modelling Languages

Die Arbeit adressiert insgesamt drei Forschungsschwerpunkte. Der erste Schwerpunkt setzt sich mit zu entwickelnden BPMN-Erweiterungen auseinander und stellt deren methodische Implikationen im Rahmen der bestehenden Sprachstandards dar. Dies umfasst zum einen ganz konkrete Spracherweiterungen wie z. B. BPMN4CP, eine BPMN-Erweiterung zur multi-perspektivischen Modellierung von klinischen Behandlungspfaden. Zum anderen betrifft dieser Teil auch modellierungsmethodische Konsequenzen, um parallel sowohl die zugrunde liegende Sprache (d. h. das BPMN-Metamodell) als auch die Methode zur Erweiterungsentwicklung zu verbessern und somit den festgestellten Unzulänglichkeiten zu begegnen. Der zweite Schwerpunkt adressiert die Untersuchung von sprachunabhängigen Fragen der Erweiterbarkeit, welche sich entweder während der Bearbeitung des ersten Teils ergeben haben oder aus dessen Ergebnissen induktiv geschlossen wurden. Der Forschungsschwerpunkt fokussiert dabei insbesondere eine Konsolidierung bestehender Terminologien, die Beschreibung generisch anwendbarer Erweiterungsmechanismen sowie die nutzerorientierte Analyse eines potentiellen Erweiterungsbedarfs. Dieser Teil bereitet somit die Entwicklung einer generischen Erweiterungsmethode grundlegend vor. Hierzu zählt auch die fundamentale Auseinandersetzung mit Unternehmensmodellierungssprachen generell, da nur eine ganzheitliche, widerspruchsfreie und integrierte Sprachdefinition Erweiterungen überhaupt ermöglichen und gelingen lassen kann. Dies betrifft beispielsweise die Spezifikation der intendierten Semantik einer Sprache