Dilemmas in Enterprise Architecture Research and Practice from a Perspective of Feral Information Systems

Abstract

This paper is presenting a discussion of feral information systems (FIS) in relationship to enterprise architecture (EA) thereby aiming to better qualify the architectural understanding of information systems not in line with corporate IT/IS strategy and policies. A qualitative and case-based approach is used as empirical foundation of this paper. With users developing own IS, classical strategy-based EA approaches are challenged. Identifying FIS can strongly improve insight into organizational processes and shortcomings official EA. A functional and temporal perspective is proposed to guide EA processes to embrace unofficial, user-driven systems. As FIS tend not to follow any rules of corporate IS, EA embrace of FIS is more complex. Using a meta-model for the social and operational character of FIS this complexity can be managed along with the improve business insight. The recognition of FIS in EA both opens up for insight in local adaptations of business processes, but can also create room for low-cost innovation and rapid response to changes in business conditions. Several forecasts are suggesting corporate IT/IS to be more user-driven and with reduced control from IT/IS professionals. This paper is opening a discussion on EA practice when centralized control is assumed to decline. EA has a tendency to be developed "top-down" emphasizing strategic alignment. In this contributed it is suggested to include social and operational alignment in EA practice.

Shadow IT and Business-Managed IT

“…Thus, covert IS, which represent the implicit focus in research on Shadow IT, are not involved in given IT management controls of a company. Depending on a company's IT management maturity they are neither registered nor strategically planned within organizational IT management processes (Boynton et al, 1994) such as IT service management (Zimmermann and Rentrop, 2014) or enterprise architecture management (Fuerstenau and Rothe, 2014;Huber et al, 2017;Tambo and Baekgaard, 2013).…”

“…Considering the whole body of knowledge about Shadow IT, it is mostly viewed with a negative connotation, but both researchers and practitioners are increasingly dealing with its potential benefits . It can contribute to a company's innovative potential (Silic et al, 2016), lead to an increased organizational agility (Tambo and Baekgaard, 2013), or simply be a way to deal with shortcomings of corporate IT systems (Alter, 2014;Behrens, 2009). These aspects stand in contrast to the negative connotation of the term Shadow IT.…”

A survey of the use and purpose of spreadsheetsin SMEs in Serbia

“…One should also not disregard the fact that often, due to the development of a Shadow system, the completion of current tasks is often delayed, and the time used for thedevelopment of a Shadow system is not recorded as an IT cost, which affects the total performance of the organization [41]. Due to their rather disintegrated nature, Shadow systems may create redundancy of operations and problems with data integrity and quality ( [2], [16] mentioned in [19], [41], [42]). …”

The Relation of Shadow Systems and ERP Systems—Insights from a Multiple-Case Study

“…The goal of this IT support is a high enterprise integration [13]. However, there is evidence that shadow systems lead to redundancy [7,14,15] and a lack of integration in the enterprise architecture [4,5,16,17]. While one of the main goals of Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is to support these integration and standardization requirements of an organization [18,19], existing shadow systems preclude this goal [20].…”

“…Shadow systems are a result of the case that business workgroups implement additional systems, which exist outside of an organizational IT service management [3] and are often not integrated with other enterprise systems [4,5]. Shadow systems support daily activities sometimes even in the same processes as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems [6][7][8].…”