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.
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.
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