Supplementing Enterprise Architecture Approaches With Support for Executing Collaborative Tasks — A Case of Togaf Adm

Abstract

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.

Model-enabled design and engineering of organisations and their enterprises

“…collaboration engineering [13] and soft systems methodology [17] in an organisational design and engineering context [67][68][69][70].…”

Conceptual Model of Enterprise Architecture Management

“…10, p. 45). Unsurprisingly, many authors [11][12][13][14][51][52][53][54][55][56] use the traditional four-step approach to EAM as a generic reference model of EAM in their research.…”

“…This traditional four-step approach to EAM was later supported by other authors [7][8][9][10] who proposed its different variations. This approach to EAM dominates and essentially defines the current EA literature since many authors [11][12][13][14] use it as a reference model of EAM in their research. Moreover, the traditional approach to EAM 10 is considered as a de facto standard in EA practice.…”

Automatic enforcement of constraints in real-time collaborative architectural decision making

“…They also note that efficient collaboration between stakeholders is one of the main critical success factors for EA. Nakakawa et al conducted a survey on effective execution of collaborative tasks during EA creation and highlighted -among others -the following challenges, reported by 70 enterprise architects (Nakakawa et al, 2013): (1) it is hard to reach consensus due to conflicting stakeholders' interests, (2) organization politics result in fuzzy decision making, (3) stakeholders are not accountable for their decisions, (4) lack of a clear decision making unit, (5) lack of a governance process that can ensure architecture compliance, (6) lack of supporting tools and techniques for executing collaborative tasks. Similar results have been reported by Päivi Ovaska et al In Ovaska et al (2003) they conducted a case study in an international ICT company, analyzing coordination challenges in multi-site environment with geographically dispersed development teams.…”

“…However, none of these approaches considers the various stakeholders' decision making constraints due to their roles in the development process. This is despite the fact that such roles (see, e.g., Eckstein, 2010;Nord et al, 2009;Smolander and Päivärinta, 2002), their potentially diverging rights and duties and their potentially conflicting objectives (see, e.g., Nakakawa et al, 2013;Ovaska et al, 2003;Raadt et al, 2008) within a possibly constrained (see, e.g., Cantor and Sanders, 2007;Jensen and Scacchi, 2010;Kofman et al, 2009) decision making process actually do exist. As an exemplary decision making constraint, consider that a stakeholder with the role Integration Architect must be in agreement with a stakeholder with the role Application Architect before an architectural decision that concerns technical development aspects can be finalized.…”