In this paper we address the concept of business architecture. We explain the concept and, based on a case study, discuss its relevance, operation, relationship with strategy and business models, and value for an organization. We also shortly discuss the approach that was taken to create the business architecture; how it was based on and derived from the business strategy. Business architectures contribute to clarify the complexity within an organization and form a useful starting point from which to develop subsequent functional, information, process and application architectures. We clarify these relationships through an architecture linkage model. Having an explicit business architecture also helps to structure the responsibilities within an organization, and to shape outsourcing activities, within the primary process as well as with regard to ICT-support. Business architectures contribute to an adequate ICT-governance in order to orchestrate the resources for critical business activities and how to manage the development and support for e-business efficiently.

Government agencies need to transform the way in which they are organized in order to be able to provide better services to their constituents and adapt to changes in legislation. Whereas much e-government research has a technology focus, our goal is to investigate whether business architectures can help governments to recreate agencies to make them robust in dealing with political preferences, and further, whether their adoption can guide the realization of IT-oriented enterprise architectures. In this article the concept of business architecture and its implications are analyzed by investigating the case study of the Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Services. The case demonstrates the mediating role business architectures can play between policy and strategy on the one hand, and enterprise IT architecture on the other. Business architectures help: (1) to define business domains and the events connecting them, and (2) to use principles to integrate the domains and ensure synergies. Business domains can be designed and operated independently, which enable higher levels of adaptability. Our case analyses show that the pluriformity of the political visions, public values, and actors involved and the division of responsibilities complicate the creation of a business architecture.

Storylines are introduced in climate science to provide unity of discourse, integrate the physical and socioeconomic components of phenomena, and make climate evolution more tangible. The use of this concept by multiple scholar communities and the novelty of some of its applications renders the concept ambiguous nonetheless, because the term hides behind a wide range of purposes, understandings, and methodologies. This semi-systematic literature review identifies three approaches that use storylines as a keystone concept: scenarios-familiar for their use in IPCC reports-discourseanalytical approaches, and physical climate storylines. After screening peer-reviewed articles that mention climate and storylines, 270 articles are selected, with 158, 55, and 57 in each category. The results indicate that each scholarly community works with a finite and different set of methods and diverging understandings. Moreover, these approaches have received criticism in their assembly of storylines: either for lacking explicitness or for the homogeneity of expertise involved. This article proposes that cross-pollination among the approaches can improve the usefulness and usability of climate-related storylines. Among good practices are the involvement of a broader range of scientific disciplines and expertise, use of mixed-methods, assessment of storylines against a wider set of quality criteria, and targeted stakeholder participation in key stages of the process.

Recent European Commission-funded projects Destination Earth and EERIE aim to provide state-of-the-art climate change projections with a strong emphasis on increasing spatial resolution and user interactivity, which is possible due to the significant advancements in high-performance computing. However, rather than just focusing on improvements in climate outputs following traditional modelling exercises, these projects also aim to communicate the potential consequences of climate change in a way that is relevant for particular regional and local decision-makers. In this regard, both projects will apply alternative approaches to represent uncertainty in the future climate, so-called physical climate storylines (PCS). Defined in Shepherd & Lloyd (2021) as ‘physically self-consistent unfoldings of past events, or of plausible future events or pathways’, PCS have many overlaps with the methodology behind surrogate climate change and the likelihood estimations of the IPCC’s extreme weather and climate events. This complementary approach to conventional risk assessment can be applied to simulate historic extreme events in a warmer climate to identify adaptation options (Destination Earth) and tipping points with associated consequences for the global and regional climate (EERIE). The study aims to find usability gaps in the PCS approaches of Destination Earth and EERIE. Social science can play an important role in filling the gaps by analyzing the user’s discourse on scientific uncertainty and its implications for decision-making. Given that the PCS approach is advantageous on smaller scales with high uncertainty about future changes in climate variability, it should be receptive to an environment accentuated by value judgements and where perspectives, evidence, risk preferences and errors are continuously redefined. Discourse-analytical approaches can help uncover these aspects. Moreover, for adaptive decision-making using a bottom-up approach, climate change is just another factor to consider among a wide range of potentially competing issues and demands. Becoming part of an extensive risk assessment which includes many non-climatic components, implies that PCS should be tailored to the user’s socioeconomic setting, which explains system vulnerabilities, resilience and coping capacities towards the future climate based on conditional statements. Transparent and rigorous insights into creating and managing co-produced climate information are critical for PCS’s objective to fit the local decision context. Therefore, a storyline should include climate analysis anchored in physical knowledge, which can be translated into robust and actionable climate adaptation output. The two European projects will be evaluated on their uptake of PCS as a tool to guide adaptive decision-making. Especially an effort will be made to discover the advantages and limitations of applying PCS of future climates in a co-developmental way.