Framework for the strategic planning of enterprise architectures

Abstract

Modern enterprises are not only highly interwoven systems, consisting of numerous technical and human components, but are also facing an increasing number of regulatory, technical, and economic changes. In this highly dynamic environment, enterprises are forced to continuously adapt the way they do business, and the kind of business they do. These transformations however need considerable planning efforts to succeed, and hence benefit from an overarching perspective on the enterprise — spanning business and IT. This perspective is taken by enterprise architecture (EA) management to coordinate the transformation efforts and to provide an understanding of the current and the target state. This management function employs models as the foundation for planning activities, and as a means for the documentation of the architectural state.

Existing EA management approaches employ fairly distinct perspectives regarding the enterprise transformation planning. Furthermore, the topic of EA modeling is only partially covered in the present frameworks. This work therefore seeks to establish a unified perspective on enterprise transformation planning and proposes a framework for the strategic planning of the EA. As a foundation for this overall objective, a mapping of different terminologies found in state-of-the-art EA management approaches is contributed. This foundation helps to describe the common concepts and their relationships as requirements for a framework targeting the strategic EA planning. As a further contribution of this work, a planning-framework is presented, structuring the common concepts as to their application in an EA planning endeavor. This framework and the underlying requirements have furthermore been discussed in expert interviews and evaluated in an online survey. Overall, this work provides a foundation for the development of modeling techniques and can act as a basis for a possible tool support of strategic enterprise architecture planning.

Results (Excerpt)

As one of the results of the thesis, requirements for a framework targeting the strategic planning of enterprise architectures have been defined and evaluated. These requirements have been derived from a literature research and multiple expert interviews. The resulting requirements are listed briefly in the following:

The framework must provide a mechanism ...

These requirements led to a conceptual realization as a framework, whose structure was influenced by the core concepts of a version control system. The structure of the resulting framework is presented in the following figure.

The results are presented in detail in the thesis.

Literature (Excerpt)