Everyone’s Going to be an Architect: Design Principles for Architectural Thinking in Agile Organizations

Organizational agility is a prominent aim for companies to thrive in today’s volatile business environments. One common building block of agility are (semi-) autonomous teams for continuously fulfilling and surpassing customers’ needs. However, these teams still need to see the enterprise’s ‘big picture’ of strategic objectives, business processes, and IT landscape to prevent organizational inertia or technical debt. This requires architectural thinking to inform these ‘non’-architects’ decision-making. To aid companies towards achieving sustainable agility, we propose six design principles as underlying logic on how to realize architectural thinking in agile organizations. The results are based on insights from interviews with sixteen employees and consultants with expertise on architecture management and organizational agility across several industries. Our work closes a gap in the agility literature, which so far mainly focused on non-generalizable blueprints for agile setups without showing their underlying logics, or approaches and role set-ups for enterprise-level architecture management

Teaching the Chief Information Officers: An Assessment of the Interrelations within their Skill Set

Due to the high volatility in the field of information technology (IT) and the rapid technological advancements, all IT professionals constantly have to be able to evaluate trends and put them into context. This is especially true for those who fulfill the role of a company’s chief information officer (CIO). But if there is a gap between the required set of skills and those needed, training becomes necessary. In order to plan training programs, one has to know the skill set of current CIOs. We investigate this by conducting workshops with 21 CIOs from a diverse set of companies. The purpose of this paper is to better understand the skill items of CIOs and how they interrelate

Towards a Service-Oriented Enterprise: The Design of a Cloud Business Integration Platform in a Medium-Sized Manufacturing Enterprise

This case study research followed the two-year transition of a medium-sized manufacturing firm towards a service-oriented enterprise. A service-oriented enterprise is an emerging architecture of the firm that leverages the paradigm of services computing to integrate the capabilities of the firm with the complementary competencies of business partners to offer customers with value-added products and services. Design science research in information systems was employed to pursue the primary design of a cloud business integration platform to enable the secondary design of multi-enterprise business processes to enable the dynamic and effective integration of business partner capabilities with those of the enterprise. The results from the study received industry acclaim for the designed solutions innovativeness and business results in the case study environment. The research makes contributions to the IT practitioner and scholarly knowledge base by providing insight into key constructs associated with service-oriented design and deployment of a cloud enterprise architecture and cloud intermediation model to achieve business results. The study demonstrated how an outside-in service-oriented architecture adoption pattern and cloud computing model enabled a medium-sized manufacturing enterprise to focus on a comprehensive approach to business partner integration and collaboration. The cloud integration platform has enabled a range of secondary designs that leveraged business services to orchestrate inter-enterprise business processes for choreography into service systems and networks for the purposes of value creation. The study results demonstrated enhanced levels of business process agility enabled by the cloud platform leading to secondary designs of transactional, differentiated, innovative, and improvisational business processes. The study provides a foundation for future scholarly research on the role of cloud integration platforms in enterprise computing and the increased importance of service-oriented secondary designs to exploit cloud platforms for sustained business performance

Factors That Affect The Adoption Of Cloud Computing For An Enterprise: A Case Study Of Cloud Adoption Within Intel Corporation

With so much hype about cloud computing, it’s easy to lose sight of why it’s such an important trend. Cloud Computing (CC) has the potential to offer enterprise IT management and their employee’s tremendous opportunities to solve critical challenges to better serve business. This research explores the current barriers to entries that are preventing wide scale enterprise adoption of Cloud services for critical business services and what is required to overcome such challenges and uses a case study approach to examine the actual adoption of Cloud Computing in Intel Corporation. The results of the study indicates the key factors that IT organisations and business leaders alike across an enterprise will need to consider when making Cloud Computing adoption more pervasive across their enterprise. Intel identified barriers to Cloud Adoption such as (i) the need to work closely with suppliers to commit to a timeline of when they will be in a position to support their applications in the cloud (ii) the presence of redundant configurations that are not fully proven in such highly virtual multi-tenant virtual environments that require load balanced highly available web front ends, and (iii) application security validation which is a big concern for enterprise IT organisation such as Intel in their private cloud, and (iv) having a complete understanding of application workloads and behaviours

Proceedings der 11. Internationalen Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI2013) - Band 1

The two volumes represent the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik WI2013 (Business Information Systems). They include 118 papers from ten research tracks, a general track and the Student Consortium. The selection of all submissions was subject to a double blind procedure with three reviews for each paper and an overall acceptance rate of 25 percent. The WI2013 was organized at the University of Leipzig between February 27th and March 1st, 2013 and followed the main themes Innovation, Integration and Individualization.:Track 1: Individualization and Consumerization Track 2: Integrated Systems in Manufacturing Industries Track 3: Integrated Systems in Service Industries Track 4: Innovations and Business Models Track 5: Information and Knowledge ManagementDie zweibändigen Tagungsbände zur 11. Internationalen Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI2013) enthalten 118 Forschungsbeiträge aus zehn thematischen Tracks der Wirtschaftsinformatik, einem General Track sowie einem Student Consortium. Die Selektion der Artikel erfolgte nach einem Double-Blind-Verfahren mit jeweils drei Gutachten und führte zu einer Annahmequote von 25%. Die WI2013 hat vom 27.02. - 01.03.2013 unter den Leitthemen Innovation, Integration und Individualisierung an der Universität Leipzig stattgefunden.:Track 1: Individualization and Consumerization Track 2: Integrated Systems in Manufacturing Industries Track 3: Integrated Systems in Service Industries Track 4: Innovations and Business Models Track 5: Information and Knowledge Managemen

Method support for enterprise architecture management capabilities

"What can our EA organization do and/or what should it be capable of?". In order to answer this questions, a capability-based method is developed, which assists in the identification, structuring and management of capabilities. The approach is embedded in a process comprising four building blocks providing appropriated procedures, concepts and supporting tools evolved from theory and practical use cases. The guide represents a flexible method for capability newcomers and experienced audiences to optimize enterprises’ economic impacts of EAM supporting the alignment of business and IT.„Was muss unser UAM leisten können?“ Als Grundlage für die Beantwortung dieser Frage sollen Konzepte aus dem Fähigkeitenmanagement genutzt werden. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wird eine fähigkeitenbasierte Methode entwickelt, welche Unternehmen bei der Identifikation, Strukturierung und Verwaltung von UAM-Fähigkeiten unterstützt. Der Ansatz ist in einen Prozess eingegliedert, welcher vier Hauptbestandteile beinhaltet und die für die Durchführung notwendigen Vorgehen, Konzepte und Hilfsmittel beschreibt, welche wiederrum in Kooperationen mit der Praxis getestet wurden

An automated closed-loop framework to enforce security policies from anomaly detection

Due to the growing complexity and scale of IT systems, there is an increasing need to automate and streamline routine maintenance and security management procedures, to reduce costs and improve productivity. In the case of security incidents, the implementation and application of response actions require significant efforts from operators and developers in translating policies to code. Even if Machine Learning (ML) models are used to find anomalies, they need to be regularly trained/updated to avoid becoming outdated. In an evolving environment, a ML model with outdated training might put at risk the organization it was supposed to defend. To overcome those issues, in this paper we propose an automated closed-loop process with three stages. The first stage focuses on obtaining the Decision Trees (DT) that classify anomalies. In the second stage, DTs are translated into security Policies as Code based on languages recognized by the Policy Engine (PE). In the last stage, the translated security policies feed the Policy Engines that enforce them by converting them into specific instruction sets. We also demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed framework, by presenting an example that encompasses the three stages of the closed-loop process. The proposed framework may integrate a broad spectrum of domains and use cases, being able for instance to support the decide and the act stages of the ETSI Zero-touch Network & Service Management (ZSM) framework.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio