Enterprise Architecture for Strategic Management of Modern IT Solutions

Tiko Iyamu

• Publisher: Auerbach Publications
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032214351
• eBook ISBN: 9781000551846
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Networking
• Index: Computer Science

The popularity of enterprise architecture (EA) has increased in the last two decades, in both business and academic domains. Despite the cumulative interest from all sectors, the implementation and practice of EA have been entangled with numerous challenges and complexities. Consequently, some organisations continue to theorise the concept, which has ramifications on practice and ROI. This has led to many studies that have been conducted, to understand the complexities impacting the implementation and practice of EA in organisations. Yet, the trajectory of some convolutions remain amystery in many quarters. This attributes to the struggle to articulate the value of EA in many environments. Hence many organisations find it difficult to apply EA for strategic management of modern information technology (IT) solutions.

Enterprise Architecture for strategic Management of Modern IT Solutions provides guidance on how to employ EA in deploying and managing IT solutions from pragmatic and implementable perspectives. Until now, implementation and practice of EA have been slow, despite its growing popularity and interest from all sectors. This book employs sociotechnical theories such as actor-network theory (ANT) and structuration theory (ST) as lenses to examine and explain why and how challenges and complexities exist and derail the implementation or practice of EA in organisations.This serves to enable practitioners and readers to gain fresh insights on why the challenges exist and how they can be addressed in creating collaborative capabilities for business enhancement, sustainability, and competitiveness.

The book provides detailed insights on how to apply EA for organisational purposes, from three main fronts. First, it explains the implications that lack of understanding of EA have on organisational activities and processes. Second, it examines the challenges and complexities that hinder the implementation and practice of EA in organisations. Third, it proposes models and frameworks on how EA can be applied for strategic management of modern IT solutions in organisations.

Written for postgraduates, researchers, academics, and professionals in the fields of EA, IT, and information systems, this book provides a valuable resource that will enable and enhance implementation and practice of EA including future studies.

Chapter 1Introduction

DOI: 10.1201/9781003268420-1

Introduction

This book covers the application of enterprise architecture (EA) for the strategic management of information technology (IT) solutions. First, it identifies the IT solutions and highlights their relevance and usefulness in organisations. Secondly, it introduces EA and examines the concept through its domains; from business to technical architectures, and within the contexts of practice and theory. This includes the ‘disconnects’ that exist in technology deployment, information flow, business and IT alignment. With this, a better understanding of why things happen the way that they do in the computing environments of various organisations is gained. Also, the book provides empirical insights into the concept’s capacity and skill set. It explains how capacity influences and affects the development, implementation and practice of EA in an organisation.

There are two fundamental challenges for many organisations: return on investment (ROI) and how IT solutions are used or can be used to address constraints and enable goals. In achieving ROI, organisations increasingly rely on IT solutions to enable and support their goals and objectives. Many organisations progressively make the deployment (development and implementation), management and practice of IT solutions critical. Also, there continues to be a disconnectedness between what is a business need and what is an architectural constraint. This negatively affects the alignment and collaborative initiatives between the business and IT units in many organisations. For example, having a suite of mobile applications that aims to provide personalised value to an individual user may not be enough. Needless to say, the collaboration required amongst the many enterprise applications is substantial. The impact some of the challenges have on decisions requires analyses and methods in order to translate and align IT solutions with business objectives successfully and profitably.

As a result of the many challenges, organisations increasingly invest in IT solutions and allocate a substantial resource to enable and support operational and strategic processes and activities. Also, various approaches and methods, including EA, have been employed to maintain and govern the selection and use of IT solutions. Despite these efforts, some of the challenges persist in many organisations. It is worse in some organisations in that some of the challenges derail business process, information exchange and management and the deployment and governance of IT solutions. Despite numerous efforts, ROI and better outcome continue to be challenging for many organisations across the spectrum of industries.

In the last three decades, three fundamental things have happened to the concept of EA. One, the interest in EA continues to increase, which engenders a popular debate and discourse on both academic and business platforms. One of the major rationales for the increasing interest is the premised benefits, such as cost reduction, standardisation, design and process improvement and strategic differentiation (Niemi & Pekkola, 2019; Shanks et al., 2018; Syynimaa, 2016). Also, the pace of deployment within private and public enterprises is slow, which affects the actualisation of the benefits towards customer satisfaction and service delivery to communities. This, reflectively, can be associated with the complexity in conveying the intent and priorities of EA across the structures of organisations (Kotusev, 2019; Hendrickx, 2015). Thirdly, accepting the concept has been a major challenge in many organisations. This can be attributed to different factors, such as lack of ability to derive requirements, design and implement IT and business based-projects (Löhe & Legner, 2014), and the skill and competence to motivate the rationale and strategic intent of the concept.

These three vital issues can be attributed to confusions and misunderstandings about the concept, which manifest from the fact that the influential factors of the concept are not well known to the promoters. As a result, many enterprises continue to be hesitant about or dismissive of the concept, despite its potentialities. This book therefore focuses on the use of EA for the strategic management of modern IT solutions in achieving enterprises’ goals and objectives.

The book provides readers with deep and comprehensive insights to gain a better understanding of how to employ EA in managing modern IT solutions for business, and to maintain sustainability and advance competitiveness. It draws on pragmatic roadmaps in deploying IT solutions in enabling business goals and objectives effectively and efficiently. In doing so, the book provides guidance on the adoption, management and use of modern IT solutions through business requirements, standardisation and governance. Irrespective of the industry or sector, the book enacts a rethinking of IT solutions as a collaborative capability through the concept of EA. It offers practical guidelines to organisations in the use of EA for the strategic management of modern IT solutions that take budget control into consideration.

Information Technology Solutions

Improved returns can be achieved by deploying active collaborative capability through the use of EA. This chapter introduces and identifies IT solutions and highlights how they can be managed to ensure that passive information sharing as well as active and participative decision-making are geared towards competitiveness. The aim is to significantly improve business process, information management, collaborative tools and efforts and technologies and systems’ deployment and use in an environment. Another challenge is that there seems to be a lack of understanding of the extensiveness of information services for the deployment of rule-based IT solutions. This book provides fresh perspectives for an improvement without compromising competitive advantage.

Introduction to Enterprise Architecture

In this chapter, EA is systematically introduced through clarifications of terms that lead to the definition, and existing frameworks are recognised. This is to lay a foundation towards understanding why many organisations continually struggle to achieve their goals despite the deployment of an EA framework (Urbaczewski & Mrdalj, 2006). To this extent, some organisations combine EA frameworks from the available, such as Gartner Inc., Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) and The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) (Simon, Fischbach & Schoder, 2014), which is sometimes prohibitive. This chapter and the entire book focus on the concept of EA rather than any of the frameworks. This is done by focusing the objective and discussion on the factors that impact the development and implementation of EA; how EA is used as a tool for the integration of information systems and technologies within an environment and the role of EA in an environment for competitive initiatives. This leads to exploring some of the confusions.

Data and Information Architectures: the Confounded Confusion

Even though the terminologies are not new, and are clearly distinctive in many quarters and languages, there continues to be a loose and interchangeable use of the terms ‘data’ and ‘information’ within organisations (Grabara, Kolcun & Kot, 2014). This is a challenge that extends to the EA discipline, and which has an impact on how the domains of data and information architectures are defined, developed, implemented and practised in many organisations. The challenge leads to the misunderstanding of both technical and business requirements, as well as the confusion about differentiation between data and information architectures. This challenge affects the accomplishment of IT solutions in using either data or information in an organisation. Frequently, this is caused by the fact that data is referred to as information, meaning it has been refined; which is incorrect, and therefore affects the requirements. This chapter presents a solution to halt a further misconstruction of the architectures and avoid the confusing challenges it has for organisations for ease of contribution to managing IT solutions for business enhancement.

Business Analysis and Business Architectures: the Implications for Organisations

A similar spectacle of the confounded confusion of data and information in the preceding chapter applies to the coexistence of the concepts of business architecture and business analysis in an organisation. The concepts have many things in common, with ramifications for organisations. The commonalities bring a beneficiary synergy to the organisations that employ both concepts. However, the complementarity also imposes challenges, such as how the concepts align, integrate or complement each other within an organisation. This has not been discussed in any study or book. Also, some of the challenges lead to confusion, disorientation and defragmentation of IT solutions, processes and activities in many organisations where both concepts are employed in parallel. The challenges get even worse as they increasingly continue to impact the structures in some organisations. This happens through the allocation of roles and responsibilities between the business analysis and business architecture units. Thus, the parallelism of both concepts raises a fundamental question – whether business analysis and business architecture are roles or titles. The management and use of IT solutions is one of the beneficiaries in answering this vital question.

This confusion manifests in a power struggle and selective accountability of practical unconsciousness as actors exert their mandates and authorities within the organisation. These challenges and confusion happen at different levels and do influence the use and management of IT solutions, and ultimately affect the organisation’s competitiveness and overall performance. In this chapter and other parts of the book, the distinction between business analysis and business architecture, from the perspective of the computing environment is examined, discussed and highlighted. The chapter reveals differentiation, functionalism and serviceability as some of the critical factors which influence the challenges and confusion that are posed by the concepts’ parallelism. Also examined are the implications of parallelism that both concepts bring into an organisational environment. This is done to pave a clearer path and intendedly reduce the negative impacts that the confusion and challenges do unconsciously and in practice have on processes and activities in the use and management of IT solutions.

Theorising Enterprise Architecture into Practice

EA is more of an applied discipline than a theoretical framework. This is mainly because it is expected to guide an organisation’s practices in areas such as IT solutions, business process design and information governance towards sustainability and competitiveness. However, this has not always been the case in many organisations, in that the concept of EA continues to gain more theoretical attention than implementation and practice. Inevitably, the prevalent situation triggered the question: What are the implications of theorising the concept of EA in organisations? This chapter puts in the spotlight the necessity to examine and gain an understanding of the implications which the theorising of EA has for both academic and business industries. The implications of theorising EA are identified and a model is developed. The model draws on, and shows the interconnectivity and interrelationship between the theory and practice (post implementation) of EA.

Structuration View of Enterprise Architecture

In the last two decades, particularly, the interest in EA from both the academic and business domains has grown tremendously. Despite the overwhelming i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgement
• Author
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Information Technology Solutions
• 3 Introduction to Enterprise Architecture
• 4 Data and Information Architectures: The Confounded Confusion
• 5 Business Analysis and Business Architecture: The Implications for organisations
• 6 Theorising Enterprise Architecture into Practice
• 7 Structuration View of Enterprise Architecture
• 8 Readiness Assessment Model for Enterprise Business Architecture
• 9 Enterprise Architecture as Agent of Change for Enterprises
• 10 Unified Architecture Framework for Enterprises
• 11 Assessing the Value of Enterprise Architecture in Organisations
• 12 A Capacity Maturity Model for Enterprise Architecture
• Index