Impact of Principles on Enterprise Engineering

Abstract

Increasingly, organizations make use of enterprise architectures to direct the development of the enterprise as a whole and the development of their IT portfolio in particular. This steering and directing is done by means of principles, which are essentially regarded as constraints on the design space for enterprise engineers, thus guiding them in their design efforts. In this paper we study the potential constraining effect of principles on the design of enterprises as well as the guidance designers may receive from these principles. We start by providing a brief discussion on the concepts of enterprise architecture and enterprise engineering. We continue by discussing a strategy to make principles specific and measurable enough to indeed allow them to constrain design space. This is followed by a discussion of a number of examples, taken from real-life practice, illustrating the steering effect of principles. Finally, we also briefly pay attention to the process that may be followed in formulating and formalizing principles.Software TechnologyElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc