Aligning Strategic-Driven Governance of Business IT Services With Their Agile Development

Large organizations often describe IT needs in terms of services. IT governance mechanisms ensure investments lead to systems aligned with the long-term objectives. This business and IT alignment is often evaluated at the early stages when a service development decision needs to be taken. Evaluating such an alignment nevertheless requires knowledge and details on the tasks, activities, and requirements that the service is supposed to support. This is incompatible with agile development principles that prescribe to focus on an ad-hoc design built during a sprint. The latter indeed uses an operational approach where value delivered to stakeholders is the driver. This chapter advocates that investment decisions based on (coarse-grained) services is reconcilable with their agile development. It proposes Agile-MoDrIGo, a model-driven IT governance framework using services as scope elements and relying on agile to determine run-time behavior. To this end, the framework uses parallel top-down and bottom-up approaches based on conceptual models where integration is ensured by a middle layer.

The theoretical basis of enterprise architecture: A critical review and taxonomy of relevant theories

Enterprise architecture is a collection of artifacts describing various aspects of an organization from an integrated business and IT perspective. Practicing enterprise architecture in organizations implies using these artifacts to facilitate information systems planning and improve business and IT alignment. Despite its long history, the enterprise architecture discipline still remains largely atheoretical and lacks a solid theoretical basis. Based on our previous empirical studies of the practical usage of enterprise architecture artifacts in multiple organizations and broad literature analysis, this conceptual article identifies and discusses in detail 10 theories that can be considered key for understanding how an enterprise architecture practice works: actor-network theory, boundary objects theory, cognitive fit theory, communities of practice theory, decision-making theories, information processing theory, knowledge management theory, management fashion theory, media richness theory, and uncertainty principle. Taken together, these theories offer a comprehensive theoretical view of an enterprise architecture practice explaining the role of enterprise architecture artifacts, their usability, and participation of stakeholders and, therefore, may constitute a theoretical basis of the entire enterprise architecture discipline. Although this article does not elaborate on any of these theories, it brings these theories to light, establishes their critical importance for comprehending an enterprise architecture practice, and positions them as central to the enterprise architecture discourse. Each of these theories can be leveraged by enterprise architecture scholars in their future studies for analyzing enterprise architecture practices through respective theoretical lenses. This article intends to provide fresh theoretical insights on enterprise architecture, spark new waves of theoretical enterprise architecture research, and contribute to the development of a sound theoretical foundation for the enterprise architecture discipline.

Enterprise architecture adoption issues and challenges: a systematic literature review

<p>This article on Systematic Literature Review (SLR) provides the issues and challenges faced by organizations when adopting EA. Firstly, a review of literature that discusses the problems and challenges was undertaken. Methods and theories adopted were reviewed to identify the existing approach and perspective on resulting factors that influenced EA adoption. Based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria defined in the review process, 16 articles were selected. A total of 19 challenges and problems were identified such as EA misconceptions, overlapping organizational rules, unclear leadership as well as lack of business and IT alignment. A sum of 15 factors from multidimensional contexts that influenced the EA adoption in the organization were also discussed, such as top management support, governance, communication as well as EA knowledge and skill. This SLR also reflected that there were relatively little empirical studies conducted on EA adoption studies. The existing studies tend to apply single and multiple theories from the organization and management domains in one study. By understanding such issues and challenges, risks can be reduced and avoided when introducing EA to organizations, and subsequently ease the deployment process. Thus, this article may shed light on understanding the organizational-related factors and the underlying relationships of EA adoption. As a result, an effective adoption of EA can be facilitated in the organizations.</p>

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.