Architecting the Firm: Coherency and Consistency in Managing the Enterprise

International audienceTraditional Enterprise Architecture (EA) practice lacks a clear and effective governance and management layer that is easily understandable and intuitive to senior decision makers with the modern organisation. This paper uses three case studies to demonstrate the relative maturity of different EA practice groups within these organisations to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of a traditional ICT management approach versus those that include EA practice in all levels and domains of management. Concepts of Coherency Management and Pervasiveness will be used to explain the idea of a next Generation of EA practice that permeates all layers of the organisation and no longer remains the domain of technologists but instead influences and informs decision-making at all levels (operational, tactical, managerial / strategic) of the organisation. Conditions of such future EA practices are also discussed

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.Griffith Sciences, School of Information and Communication TechnologyNo Full Tex

Towards an understanding of business design within enterprise architecture management: a cautionary tale

Includes bibliographical references.Business Design represents a set of concepts that are described in the literature as providing a sound foundation for sustainable competitive advantage into the future. The particular values underpinning Business design are based on the enablement of a design thinking approach to solving the imponderable problems that organisations regularly encounter. In particular, the application of a design thinking approach to Business Design requires that resultant system designs are economically viable and technologically feasible. Enterprise Architecture Management plays a vital role in supporting these latter two requirements. Yet the definition of Enterprise Architecture Management as the 'normative restriction of design freedom' (Deitz, 2011) implies constraints that could impose limits on such business design. Consequently, the qualitative inductive research described in this document was undertaken to explore the perceived paradoxical relationship between Business Design and Enterprise Architecture Management. This dissertation recounts the process and results of this research initiative based on data recorded during interviews with a number of management level staff at a leading South African Insurance organisation. The participants were intimately involved in a programme to, amongst other objectives, establish a platform to support enterprise-wide Business Design within Enterprise Architecture Management, a programme that was experiencing a number of challenges and that was still underway at the time of completion of this research. Findings arising from this research were that the varying perceptions and levels of commitment of business and IT stakeholders associated with the programme and its requirements, contributed significantly to these challenges. In addition to providing a rich description of the case organisation's journey towards the establishment of a Business Design platform, a sensitising framework – 'The 6 Cs Framework in Support of the Successful Enablement of Business Design within Enterprise Architecture Management' – is proposed as a useful tool to assist organisations that might be considering a similar programme in the future