Foundations for the Integration of Enterprise Wikis and Specialized Tools for Enterprise Architecture Management

Organizations are challenged with rapidly changing business requirements and an ever-increasing volume respectively variety of information. Enterprise Architecture (EA) and its respective management function are considered as means to overcome these challenges. Appropriate tool support to this end is an elementary success factor to guide the EA management (EAM) initiative. Nevertheless, practitioners perceive currently available tools specialized for EAM as not sufficient in their organizations. Major reasons are inflexible data models as well as missing integration with processes and their focus on expert users. Regarding these limitations Enterprise Wikis provide practice proven solutions already exploited by organizations. These Enterprise Wikis are able to extend the capabilities of existing EA tools to cope with unstructured information and leverage a better utilization of structured EA information. In this paper we present the foundations for an integration of specialized EAM tools and Enterprise Wikis. We elaborate scenarios for both tool species using a practitioner survey and differentiate four integration cases

Analyzing the Evolution and Usage of Enterprise Architecture Management Patterns

Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) evolved to a powerful function to support organizations in strategic decision making and in the fulfillment of business requirements. The organization of an EAM function is not an easy task and demands for best practices, suited to the respective needs of an organization. The pattern-based EAM approach constitutes a collection of such best practices, including detailed information on how to approach EAM activities in organizations. Recent research extended the original EAM pattern structure from 2008 with further concepts to provide more extensive patterns. We conducted an online survey with 31 EAM experts to identify current trends in this domain. We compare documented EAM patterns from 2008 with those identified in the conducted survey to evaluate changes of EAM best practices over the last years. Our research results reveal major changes of EAM needs and best practices, which evolved across several industries and point out clear trends

A Virtual Crowdsourcing Community for Open Collaboration in Science Processes

Although science has become an increasingly collaborative endeavor over the last hundred years, only little attention has been devoted to supporting scientific on-line communities. Our work focuses on scientific collaborations that revolve around complex science questions that require significant coordination to synthesize multi-disciplinary findings, enticing contributors to remain engaged for extended periods of time, and continuous growth to accommodate new contributors as needed as the work evolves over time. This paper presents a virtual crowdsourcing community for open collaboration in science processes to address these challenges. Our solution is based on the Semantic MediaWiki and extends it with new features for scientific collaboration. We present preliminary results from the usage of the interface in a pilot research project

Business Capability Maps: Current Practices and Use Cases for Enterprise Architecture Management

This paper provides a state-of-the-art report on the usage of business capability maps in enterprise architecture management. We conducted expert interviews with 25 organizations to reveal the benefits and challenges of capability-based enterprise architecture management and evaluated 14 use cases on the feasibility and benefit of using business capability maps in practice. The results reveal increasing interest and acceptance of the approach in practice and among support organizations

Enterprise Architecture Documentation: Current Practices and Future Directions

Over the past decade Enterprise Architecture (EA) management matured to a discipline commonly perceived as a strategic advantage. Among others, EA management helps to identify and realize cost saving potentials in organizations. EA initiatives commonly start by documenting the status-quo of the EA. The respective management discipline analyzes this so-called current state and derives intermediate planned states heading towards a desired target state of the architecture. Several EA frameworks describe this process in theory. However, during practical application, organizations struggle with documenting the EA and lack concrete guidance during the process. To underline our observations and confirm our hypotheses, we conducted a survey among 140 EA practitioners to analyze issues organizations face while documenting the EA and keeping the documentation up to date. In this paper we present results on current practices, challenges, and automation techniques for EA documentation in a descriptive manner

Facilitating Conflict Resolution of Models for Automated Enterprise Architecture Documentation

Enterprise Architecture (EA) management relies on solid and up-to-date information about the current state of an EA. In current practices the manual collection of information is prevailing resulting in an error-prone, time-consuming, and expensive task. Recent research efforts seek to automate this task by integrating existing information sources in the organization to optimize the EA documentation process. While automation of EA documentation enables many advantages, the transformation of the collected information to an EA model remains an unresolved challenge since it cannot be automated completely. In particular, conflicts resulting from partial transformations require involvement of EA Stakeholders possibly not having a technical background. In this paper we propose an approach for the conflict resolution facilitating our long-term goal of automated EA documentation. We illustrate our approach using a productive Enterprise Service Bus from a leading organization of the fashion industry and evaluate our approach with expert interviews

Automating Enterprise Architecture Documentation using an Enterprise Service Bus

Currently the documentation of Enterprise Architectures (EA) requires manual collection of data resulting in an error prone, expensive, and time consuming process. Recent approaches seek to automate and improve EA documentation by employing the productive system environment of organizations. In this paper, we investigate a specific Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) considered as the nervous system of an enterprise interconnecting business applications and processes as an information source. We evaluate the degree of coverage to which data of a productive system can be used for EA documentation. A vendor-specific ESB data model is reverse-engineered and transformation rules for three representative EA information models are derived. These transformation rules are employed to perform automated model transformations making the first step towards an automated EA documentation. We evaluate our approach using a productive ESB system from a leading enterprise of the fashion industry

Establishing Architecture Guidelines in Large-Scale Agile Development Through Institutional Pressures: A Single-Case Study

In today’s business environments, organizations are confronted with rapid technological advancements, regulatory uncertainties, and time-to-market pressures. The ability to detect relevant changes and to react timely and effectively becomes an important determinant for business survival. As a result, companies are striving to adopt agile methods on a larger scale to meet these requirements. The adoption of agile methods at scale poses new challenges such as inter-team coordination and communication, balancing intentional and emergent architecture or coordinating various development activities to produce desirable enterprise-wide effects. The latter can be addressed by applying architecture principles and guidelines. However, there is a lack of academic research on how architecture principles can be created and applied in large-scale agile development. Based on a mixed methods research design, this paper proposes a tool supported collaborative approach for establishing architecture principles and guidelines in an agile fashion