Resilience and enterprise architecture in SMEs

Abstract

Considering that SMEs need to embrace the drivers of resilience and that a well-defined and readily available Enterprise Architecture (EA) supports enterprise integration by enabling the common view of business processes, data and systems across the enterprise and its partners, we can say that EA is one of the tracks making resilience predictable and it should support and collaborate with other resilience tracks. However, the EA frameworks do not give relevance to the activities that contribute most to business resilience, so this paper aims to clarify the dimensions and the activities related to the development of an EA and the touching points with other enterprise wide processes in order to guarantee that resilience requirements are met in SMEs. For this I propose an approach of ecological adaptation, and four architectures: business, organizational, information, and technological, although this paper only presents the Business and Organizational Architectures.

A Systematic Literature Review of Supply Chain Resilience in Small–Medium Enterprises (SMEs): A Call for Further Research

“…However, an increasing level of information technology and its implementation with the cloud computing network within SMEs indicated an increase in organizational resilience potential [128]. Hence, cloud computing is becoming a gamechanger for SMEs as it provides a scalable infrastructure and capabilities [42].…”

Enhancing Enterprise Architecture with Resilience Perspective

“…When the SoS performance breaches the 'minimum required performance' threshold, this constitutes a total SoS failure. Gomes (2015) proposes dimensions and activities for the EA development to support the system's resilience requirements. Giannoccaro, Albino, and Nair (2018) present static and dynamic perspectives of re-silience mechanisms.…”

“…Woods (2017) highlights a unique role of resilience in enabling the enterpriser to deal with unanticipated perturbations that call into question the model of competence, and demand a shift of processes, strategies and coordination; akin to the evolution in the CSG model. Gomes (2015) also believes that EA is: 'one of the tracks making resilience predictable and it should support and collaborate with other resilience tracks'. The authors, however, continue that existing EA frameworks do not give relevance to the activities that contribute most to business resilience and the touching points with other enterprise-wide processes to guarantee that an enterprise's resilience requirements are met.…”

“…• a standard and systematic thought structure • a set of standard views and view descriptions • a standard data structure to retain and relate information • a standard approach to develop architectures Gomes (2015) defines EA as 'a complete expression of the enterprise's key strategies in terms of business and technologies, and their impact on the enterpriser's processes and functions.' EA enables the common view of business processes, data and systems, and the relationship between the elements across the enterprise and its partners.…”

“…Han, Marais, and DeLaurentis (2012) introduce a concept of 'conditional resilience' which is a percentage of the SoS's performance that remains after a failure of a specific set of systems within that SoS. When the SoS performance breaches the 'minimum required performance' threshold, this constitutes a total SoS failure Gomes (2015). proposes dimensions and activities for the EA development to support the system's resilience requirements.…”