No abstract

Gartner advises that for enterprise architecture development to be successful, it is vital that enterprise architects ensure effective communication and also form virtual teams that create and agree on enterprise architecture content. One of the ways to achieve this is to enforce Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) during enterprise architecture creation. Guided by Design Science, we are developing a method referred to as Collaborative Evaluation of (Enterprise) Architecture Design Alternatives (CEADA) to enable CDM during enterprise architecture creation. The method attempts to resolve challenges in enterprise architecting that are caused by ineffective collaboration between enterprise architects and organizational stakeholders. Requirements for CEADA have been defined based on the causality analysis theory, the generic decision-making process, enterprise architecture frameworks (and literature), and the CDM theory. In addition, Collaboration Engineering has been used to design a collaboration process to address these requirements. Models describing the requirements and the design of the collaboration process, have been evaluated using the analytical, experimental, and observational methods. This paper discusses the implications of findings from these evaluations and presents the validated requirements for realizing CDM in enterprise architecture creation. Thus, this research generally attempts to strengthen enterprise architecting guidelines with collaborative activities, so as to enable effective execution of collaboration-dependent tasks.

Effective execution of collaborative tasks during enterprise architecture creation helps to increase stakeholders' involvement and awareness in the architecture effort. However, enterprise architecture approaches lack detailed support for collaborative tasks. In an effort to address this, an exploratory survey was conducted among enterprise architects to investigate issues associated with executing collaborative tasks during enterprise architecture creation. Accordingly, this paper discusses mainly three aspects. First, it discusses how issues that were reported in the survey can be addressed by adopting the design science research methodology to guide the development of a process or method that supports the execution of collaborative tasks in architecture creation. The developed process is principally rooted in collaboration engineering and soft systems methodology (SSM). Second, the paper discusses how the developed method can be used to supplement enterprise architecture approaches that are used in practice (e.g. TOGAF) with support for executing collaborative tasks. Third, the paper discusses key findings from evaluating the developed process in two real organizations.

No abstract

Creating enterprise architecture can be perceived as a creative problem solving task, since it involves managing organizational complexity and inflexibility by devising a synergic solution from all organizational units. Creative (or collaborative) problem solving in several fields has been supported by supplementing domain specific techniques with functionalities of a Group Support System (GSS). This paper aims to demonstrate how GSSs can also be used to support collaborative problem solving in enterprise architecture creation. Using the Design Science research methodology, a method was designed to support collaborative problem solving during architecture creation. This method draws from enterprise architecture approaches that are used in practice, and collaborative problem solving theories in academia. It has been evaluated using an experiment and two real life cases. This paper presents findings from this evaluation. The findings were used to refine the method, and they indicate that the effectiveness of academia-based artifacts in addressing problems encountered in practice, can only be achieved through continuous and diverse evaluation of these artifacts in practice.

No abstract

E-government initiatives in developing countries still suffer from lack of interoperability, despite the existence of e-government interoperability frameworks in literature. For example, Uganda's e-government landscape is fragmented within and across agencies. To provide preliminary insights into addressing this, exploratory interviews were conducted to investigate why the e-government interoperability challenge prevails in Uganda, and findings were used with respect to existing literature to specify required strategic interventions. These strategic interventions point to the need for three intertwined capabilities, i.e., a regulatory and governance framework, a capacity building and sustainability framework, and an adaptation and customisation framework for e-government implementations. Therefore, the relevance of this paper is twofold. First, to give insight into strategic interventions that developing economies (that share Uganda's context) can explore to address e-government interoperability. Second, to stimulate researchers in countries that have attained e-government interoperability to publish detailed technical guidelines on implementing the strategic interventions proposed herein.

Lack of shared understanding among stakeholders is a commonly cited drawback in enterprise architecture development. Stakeholders need to have shared understanding of requirements and principles for an enterprise architecture, and the extent to which the resultant architecture addresses their concerns. However, existing approaches for enterprise architecture development lack adequate capabilities for managing aspects associated with creating shared understanding among stakeholders. Although such aspects can be largely managed by approaches for collaborative decision making and soft systems thinking, these approaches lack details on the enterprise architecture process and its products. Therefore, this paper explores ways of mutually diminishing these gaps through adopting situational method engineering, to guide the development of a situational method for enabling stakeholders to acquire shared understanding of requirements for an enterprise architecture. The situational method presented herein is a component of a broader method for supporting collaboration between stakeholders and architects during enterprise architecture creation. Although the latter was successfully evaluated in 6 enterprises, it exhibited highest performance scores in two enterprises after it was amended with the situational method. Therefore, this paper also presents key findings from evaluating the situational method in the two agencies that are located in Uganda.