Exploring the roles of different artefacts in enterprise architecture practice

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a coherent whole of principles, standards and models for designing business processes, information systems and IT infrastructure in large organizations. Enterprise architecture consists of multiple EA artefacts that describe and/or model various aspects of an organization including high-level abstract principles, business processes and technical specifications to be used by both IT and business stakeholders for the purposes ranging from strategic planning to IT systems implementation. Using EA artefacts is expected to bring numerous benefits to organizations including improved strategic alignment, increased returns on IT investments and reduced costs of IT operations. The development of EA artefacts requires significant investments of time and money. However, the organizational investments in developing EA artefacts often do not bring the expected benefits because of the usability issues associated with these EA artefacts. For instance, the U.S. Federal Government invested hundreds of millions of dollars in developing EA, but the resulting EA artefacts were largely unable to facilitate better decision-making. These common failures of EA efforts call for an investigation into the specific roles of different types of EA artefacts in an EA practice. The role of an EA artefact can be specified based on its informational contents, regular users, typical use cases and resulting organizational benefits. Despite the theoretical and practical importance of studying EA artefacts, the current EA literature offers no comprehensive theories explaining the practical roles of EA artefacts. In order to address this problem, this thesis develops a descriptive theory that explicates the roles of different types of EA artefacts in the context of an EA practice and explains the influence of various organizational and environmental factors on these roles. This exploratory study followed a “case studies-based grounded theory” approach to develop an inductive theory of the roles of EA artefacts. The theory-building process is accomplished via analysing five in-depth case studies of large organizations with established EA practices. In the five cases, 31 semi-structured interviews were undertaken with different EA practitioners and stakeholders, and samples of 39 different types of EA artefacts were studied. The data were analysed using the iterative grounded theory methodology. The practical aspects of the resulting theory were then discussed with ten additional EA experts, including EA practitioners and EA academics, who confirmed its validity and practical utility. The resulting theory articulates six primary roles fulfilled by EA artefacts metaphorically titled as Context Setters, Instrument Providers, Knowledge Repositories, Project Implementers, Strategic Aligners and Value Estimators. Each of these roles is further explained in terms of supporting artefacts, informational contents, involved users, associated use cases and resulting benefits. For example, Context Setters include EA artefacts such as principles, maxims and policies that senior business leaders and architects use to lay out the basic rules, values and aims governing information systems planning for the whole enterprise to ensure consistency of decision-making. Similarly, Value Estimators include EA artefacts such as solution overviews and conceptual architectures used by architects and business leaders to assess the business value of proposed IT initiatives, make informed funding decisions and thereby improve efficiency of IT investments. These six highly EA-specific roles provide a comprehensive explanatory view of the practical roles of EA artefacts and offer an in-depth, detailed and context-specific theoretical understanding that advances the common view of EA artefacts as boundary objects between business and IT communities and elements of an actor-network representing an EA practice. Moreover, the resulting theory explains the relationships between the six identified roles of EA artefacts as well as the impact of internal and external environmental factors on these roles. The results of this exploratory study contribute to the EA discipline a theory describing the roles of EA artefacts that helps refocus future EA research from studying EA as a whole to studying specific types of EA artefacts. The results of this study also provide evidence-based conceptual solutions to the most typical practical problems associated with using EA and can help organizations get more value from EA artefacts. Additionally, this study makes an empirical contribution to the EA discipline by demonstrating important empirical facts that question established theories, assumptions and beliefs existing in the EA discipline

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

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

Conceptual model of enterprise architecture management

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a description of an enterprise from an integrated business and IT perspective. Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is a management practice embracing all the management processes related to EA aiming to improve business and IT alignment. EAM is typically described as a sequential four-step process: (i) document the current state, (ii) describe the desired future state, (iii) develop the transition plan and (iv) implement the plan. This traditional four-step approach to EAM essentially defines the modern understanding of EA. Based on a literature review, this paper demonstrates that this four-step approach to EAM, though practiced by some companies, is inadequate as a model explaining the EAM phenomenon in general. As a substitute, this paper synthesizes the generic conceptual model of EAM providing a more realistic conceptualization of EAM describing it as a decentralized network of independent but interacting processes, artifacts and actors

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

Consolidating enterprise architecture management research

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a description of an enterprise from an integrated business and IT perspective. Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is a management practice of using EA aiming to achieve business/IT alignment. Popular EA literature states that EA always includes a documentation of current and future states of enterprises and describes EAM as an iterative stepwise process. However, plenty of evidence suggests that the real situation in EA practice and theory is much more diverse but a consolidated understanding of EAM is absent. In this paper we consolidate EAM research and present (1) a reasonable definition of EA taking into account all that we know about EA practice and (2) a consolidated view of EAM describing what we know about it beyond the most popular approaches. We also discuss the relationship between our consolidated view of EAM and the previous research, its implications and directions for future research

Enterprise architecture practice in retail: Problems and solutions

Currently Enterprise Architecture (EA) is widely practiced in different organizations working in diverse industries across the globe. Although it is generally acknowledged that there are no universal one-size-fits-all approaches to EA practice suitable to all organizations and industries, features and peculiarities of the approaches to EA followed in different industries are still poorly understood. In this article I analyze the EA practice in a large Australian retail chain operating in the fast-moving consumer goods business, discuss the industry-specific challenges with EA experienced by this company, and describe their potential solutions and mitigation strategies followed by the company

The effect of enterprise architecture deployment practices on organizational benefits: A dynamic capability perspective

In recent years, the literature has emphasized theory building in the context of Enterprise Architecture (EA) research. Specifically, scholars tend to focus on EA-based capabilities that organize and deploy organization-specific resources to align strategic objectives with the technology’s particular use. Despite the growth in EA studies, substantial gaps remain in the literature. The most substantial gaps are that the conceptualization of EA-based capabilities still lacks a firm base in theory and that there is limited empirical evidence on how EA-based capabilities drive business transformation and deliver benefits to the firm. Therefore, this study focuses on EA-based capabilities, using the dynamic capabilities view as a theoretical foundation, and develops and tests a new research model that explains how dynamic enterprise architecture capabilities lead to organizational benefits. The research model’s hypotheses are tested using a dataset that contains responses from 299 CIO’s, IT managers, and lead architects. Based on this study’s outcomes, we contend that dynamic enterprise architecture capabilities positively enhance firms’ process innovation and business–IT alignment. These mediating forces are both positively associated with organizational benefits. The firms’ EA resources and specifically EA deployment practices are essential in cultivating dynamic enterprise architecture capabilities. This study advances our understanding of how to efficaciously de-lineate dynamic enterprise architecture capabilities in delivering benefits to the organization

The Role of Enterprise Architecture for Digital Transformations

In the current turbulent and unpredictable markets, competitive advantage can no longer be achieved through high product quality or efficient processes alone [...