UTILIZING PATTERNS IN DEVELOPING DESIGN THEORIES

Aside from specialized design artifacts solving \u27wicked\u27 problems in a distinct organizational context, prescriptive (design) theories for solving classes of problems are well-accepted results of design science research. Especially for intricate problem fields, as IT service management or EA management, the development of such theories remains a highly complex research endeavor spanning a longer period of time. In this paper, we discuss how patterns, i.e. practice-proven, re-usable solutions to recurring problems, can be used to ease the establishment of a design theory, and to provide practice-relevant intermediary results prior to theory completion

Charting the landscape of enterprise architecture management

Todays enterprises are faced with the challenge of an everchanging environment, which they continuously have to adaptto. A commonly accepted means to support an enterprisein the transformation process and furthermore enhance thealignment between business and IT is enterprise architecture(EA) management, which provides a holistic perspectiveon the enterprise. In order to support an enterprise inthe transformation process, EA management creates architecturaldescriptions of current, planned, and future statesof the enterprise. Reecting the aforementioned importanceof EA management a plurality of approaches for establishingan EA management function in an enterprise have beenproposed by researchers, practitioners, and standardizationbodies. The approaches vary widely in respect to the proposedmethods, models, and languages.The objective of this article is to analyze the state-of-theartin EA and EA management respectively. Therefore, anextensive literature survey on publications in the area is performed.Criteria for the analysis are inter alia the distribution of papers over time, their regional distribution, type ofpublication, number of references of an article, and the involvedauthors groups. Thereby the article seeks to give anoverview on the current research occupation in the eld ofEA management

ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE MANAGEMENT FROM A KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT PERSPECTIVE – RESULTS FROM AN EMPIRICAL STUDY

Within the context of EAM numerous approaches proposed by researches exist. Still, it is not easy for companies to choose the most suitable one from the multitude of architecture frameworks and methods. Additionally trends in the global economy and the resulting pressure on the part of competitors force companies to introduce more effective management processes. As a consequence, EAM faces the similar challenge as that of knowledge management that is identifying, collecting and maintaining process-specific information in an efficient way. This research article addresses the aforementioned challenge by identifying weaknesses of existing approaches to enterprise architecture management and proposing future areas of research. Thereby, the future research topics are identified in two steps. Firstly, an extensive literature analysis from a knowledge management perspective derives hypotheses on possible fields for improvement and future research. These hypotheses are evaluated according to their relevance in practice in an online survey conducted among enterprise architecture management practitioners from companies belonging to various industry branches in Europe

A Pattern-based Approach to Quantitative Enterprise Architecture Analysis

Enterprise Architecture (EA) management involves tasks that substantially contribute to the operations of an enterprise, and to its sustainable market presence. One important aspect of this is the availability of services to customers. However, the increasing interconnectedness of systems with other systems and with business processes makes it difficult to get a clear view on change impacts and dependency structures. While management level decision makers need this information to make sound decisions, EA models often do not include quality attributes (such as availability), and very rarely provide quantitative means to assess them. We address these shortcomings by augmenting an information model for EA modeling with concepts from Probabilistic Relational Models, thus enabling quantitative analysis. A sample business case is evaluated as an example of the technique, showing how decision makers can benefit from information on availability impacts on enterprise business services

Interrelating concerns in ea documentation -- towards a conceptual framework of relationships

Over the last years a multitude of approaches and frameworks making prescriptions on how to document an enterprise architecture (EA) have been developed. These approaches target different purposes and correspondingly different concerns (areas of interest) in the architecture. In this way, a company seeking to develop or evolve an organization-specific EA documentation technique based on different approaches most likely runs into difficulties to understand the interdependencies between the different frameworks. In this research-in-progress paper, we revisit well-known documentation approaches to devise different types of concern relationships that may be helpful during development and evolution of an organization-specific EA documentation technique