Using ArchiMate to Assess COBIT 5 and ITIL Implementations

The assessment of Enterprise Governance of IT (EGIT) mechanisms, such as COBIT and ITIL, is considered highly complex and implies a duplication of resources. The main goal of this research is to reduce the complexity of EGIT mechanisms by facilitating the assessment of these mechanisms when used simultaneously. Organisational stakeholders should be able to easily understand the impact of implementing ITIL on COBIT 5 Processes Performance without being COBIT experts. On the other hand, they should know their organisation’s positioning according to ITIL, even if they just follow COBIT and do not master ITIL. In order to fulfil our goal, we propose a model that uses TIPA for ITIL, COBIT PAM and ArchiMate to analyse the impact of ITIL implementation on COBIT processes performance, and vice-versa. We demonstrate our proposal by analysing the impact of the Incident Management and Request Fulfilment ITIL processes on the COBIT 5 related process

Integrating enterprise architecture and Np Iso 4457

The growing importance of NP ISO 4457 and Enterprise Architecture (EA) is becoming increasingly recognized. However, since they are distinct governance approaches with different perspectives, organizations end up facing several challenges, which leads to efficiency problems, waste of resources and misalignment. This thesis proposes to overcome such problems by integrating NP ISO 4457 with EA. This way, a Reference Architecture is developed, using Archimate, which helps organizations to conform to the Standard’s requirements, by determining how processes and resources are organized and realized. This is a unique contribution, since the Reference Architecture can be applied generically to every organization

How Should Business Informatics Integrate Service, Process, Work System, and Enterprise Orientations?

Current research related to the subject matter of business informatics reflects divergent orientations that are fundamentally about representing, analyzing, and designing services or processes or work systems or enterprises. After summarizing those four orientations and citing typical exemplars, this paper identifies a variety of paths toward greater integration between different orientations within business informatics. It identifies central topics for each orientation along with areas in which each orientation provides ideas that complement other orientations and reveal possible synergies. Both the approach for identifying potential synergies and the proposed synergies themselves could encourage greater integration within business informatics

Improving IT infrastructures representation: A UML profile

IT infrastructures are most times informally modeled. The resulting models are ambiguous to stakeholders, cannot be checked for validity, and therefore are unable to play their important role in design, deployment and maintenance activities. The main reason for such a poor state-of-the-art lies mainly in the absence of a modeling language capable of representing IT infrastructures at the required level of abstraction. Indeed, existing candidate languages are too abstract, as shown in this paper by reviewing their metamodels. The present paper mitigates this problem by proposing a UML profile to describe the semantics of an IT infrastructure.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Improving IT infrastructures representation: A UML profile

IT infrastructures are most times informally modeled. The resulting models are ambiguous to stakeholders, cannot be checked for validity, and therefore are unable to play their important role in design, deployment and maintenance activities. The main reason for such a poor state-of-the-art lies mainly in the absence of a modeling language capable of representing IT infrastructures at the required level of abstraction. Indeed, existing candidate languages are too abstract, as shown in this paper by reviewing their metamodels. The present paper mitigates this problem by proposing a UML profile to describe the semantics of an IT infrastructure.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Leading the Practice in Layered Enterprise Architecture

While Enterprise Architecture (EA) causes organisations to think, work and model in domains, there are inadequacies in such a waterfall approach. By restating domains as layers, i.e. LEAD (Layered Enterprise Architecture Design/ Development) based on the LEAD Enterprise Ontology, EA performs better in enterprise layers and levels of abstraction. Through LEAD, the domain relationships are also better captured, hence leading the advancement of agile EA

A Pattern-Based Approach to Scaffold the IT Infrastructure Design Process

Context. The design of Information Technology (IT) infrastructures is a challenging task since it implies proficiency in several areas that are rarely mastered by a single person, thus raising communication problems among those in charge of conceiving, deploying, operating and maintaining/managing them. Most IT infrastructure designs are based on proprietary models, known as blueprints or product-oriented architectures, defined by vendors to facilitate the configuration of a particular solution, based upon their services and products portfolio. Existing blueprints can be facilitators in the design of solutions for a particular vendor or technology. However, since organizations may have infrastructure components from multiple vendors, the use of blueprints aligned with commercial product(s) may cause integration problems among these components and can lead to vendor lock-in. Additionally, these blueprints have a short lifecycle, due to their association with product version(s) or a specific technology, which hampers their usage as a tool for the reuse of IT infrastructure knowledge. Objectives. The objectives of this dissertation are (i) to mitigate the inability to reuse knowledge in terms of best practices in the design of IT infrastructures and, (ii) to simplify the usage of this knowledge, making the IT infrastructure designs simpler, quicker and better documented, while facilitating the integration of components from different vendors and minimizing the communication problems between teams. Method. We conducted an online survey and performed a systematic literature review to support the state of the art and to provide evidence that this research was relevant and had not been conducted before. A model-driven approach was also used for the formalization and empirical validation of well-formedness rules to enhance the overall process of designing IT infrastructures. To simplify and support the design process, a modeling tool, including its abstract and concrete syntaxes was also extended to include the main contributions of this dissertation. Results. We obtained 123 responses to the online survey. Their majority were from people with more than 15 years experience with IT infrastructures. The respondents confirmed our claims regarding the lack of formality and documentation problems on knowledge transfer and only 19% considered that their current practices to represent IT Infrastructures are efficient. A language for modeling IT Infrastructures including an abstract and concrete syntax is proposed to address the problem of informality in their design. A catalog of IT Infrastructure patterns is also proposed to allow expressing best practices in their design. The modeling tool was also evaluated and according to 84% of the respondents, this approach decreases the effort associated with IT infrastructure design and 89% considered that the use of a repository with infrastructure patterns, will help to improve the overall quality of IT infrastructures representations. A controlled experiment was also performed to assess the effectiveness of both the proposed language and the pattern-based IT infrastructure design process supported by the tool. Conclusion. With this work, we contribute to improve the current state of the art in the design of IT infrastructures replacing the ad-hoc methods with more formal ones to address the problems of ambiguity, traceability and documentation, among others, that characterize most of IT infrastructure representations. Categories and Subject Descriptors:C.0 [Computer Systems Organization]: System architecture; D.2.10 [Software Engineering]: Design-Methodologies; D.2.11 [Software Engineering]: Software Architectures-Patterns

A COMMITMENT-BASED REFERENCE ONTOLOGY FOR SERVICE: HARMONIZING SERVICE PERSPECTIVES

Nowadays, the notion of service has been widely adopted in the practice of economic sectors (e.g., Service, Manufacturing, and Extractive sectors), as well as, in the research focus of various disciplines (e.g., Marketing, Business, and Computer Science). Due to that, a number of research initiatives (e.g., service ontologies, conceptual models, and theories) have tried to understand and characterize the complex notion of service. However, due to particular views of these disciplines and economic sectors, a number of different characterizations of service (e.g., service as interaction, service as co-creation of value, and service as capability / manifestation of competence, among others) have been proposed. The existence of these various non-harmonized characterizations, and the focus on a terminological debate about the service concept, instead of about the service phenomena from a broad perspective, make the establishment of a unified body of knowledge for service difficult. This limitation impacts, e.g., the establishment of unified conceptualization for supporting the smooth alignment between Business and IT views in service-oriented enterprise architecture (SoEA), and the design and usage of service modeling languages. In this thesis we define a theoretical foundation for service based on the notion of service commitment and claims as basic elements in the characterization of service relations along service life-cycle phases (service offer, service negotiation, and service delivery). As discussed in this work, this theoretical foundation is capable of harmonizing a number of service perspectives found in the literature. Such theoretical foundation is specified in a well-founded core reference ontology, named UFO-S, which was designed by adopting a sound ontological engineering apparatus (mainly, a well-founded ontology representation language, OntoUML, and approaches of model verification and model validation). As a kind of theory, UFO-S was applied in the analysis of SoEA structuring principles in order to define a commitment-based SoEA view, which remarks social aspects inherent in service relations usually underexplored in widely adopted service-oriented approaches (such as SOA-RM by OASIS, ITIL, and ArchiMate). Based on this, UFO-S was also applied in an ontological analysis of service modeling at ArchiMates Business layer. Such ontological analysis showed some limitations concerned to semantic ambiguity and lack of expressiveness for representing service offerings (and type thereof) and service agreements in SoEA. In order to address these limitations, three service modeling patterns (service offering type pattern, service offering pattern, and service agreement pattern) were proposed taking as basis UFO-S. The usefulness of these patterns for addressing these limitations was evidentiated by means of an empirical evaluation. Finally, we can say that, beyond offering a broad and well-founded theoretical foundation for service able to harmonize service perspectives, UFO-S presented benefits as a reference model in the analysis of SoEA structuring principles, and in the (re)design of service modeling languages