John Gøtze

Enterprise engineering and management at the crossroads

Challenges to future EIS due to business, socio-economic, and ecological environment complexity.Fundamental limitations to the controllability of complex systems as a challenge to sustainability.Complexity management and complexity reduction methods.State of the art of promising relevant areas of computing and communication. The article provides an overview of the challenges and the state of the art of the discipline of Enterprise Architecture (EA), with emphasis on the challenges and future development opportunities of the underlying Information System (IS), and its IT implementation, the Enterprise Information System (EIS). The first challenge is to overcome the narrowness of scope of present practice in IS and EA, and re-gain the coverage of the entire business on all levels of management, and a holistic and systemic coverage of the enterprise as an economic entity in its social and ecological environment. The second challenge is how to face the problems caused by complexity that limit the controllability and manageability of the enterprise as a system. The third challenge is connected with the complexity problem, and describes fundamental issues of sustainability and viability. Following from the third, the fourth challenge is to identify modes of survival for systems, and dynamic system architectures that evolve and are resilient to changes of the environment in which they live. The state of the art section provides pointers to possible radical changes to models, methodologies, theories and tools in EIS design and implementation, with the potential to solve these grand challenges.

Understanding Enterprise Architecture with Topic Modeling Preliminary Research Based on Journal Articles

The next 3 years will be more important than the last 50 due to the digital transformation across industries. Enterprise Architecture (EA), the discipline that should lead enterprise responses to disruptive forces, is far from ready to drive the next wave of change. The state of the art in the discipline is not clear and the understanding among researchers and practitioners is not aligned. To address these problems, we developed a topic model to help structure the field and enable EA to evolve coherently. In this preliminary study, we present the 360 identified topics in EA literature and their evolution over time. Our study supports and combines the findings from previous research and provides both a deeper analysis and more detailed findings.

Enterprise Architecture Management: Toward a Taxonomy of Applications

Despite the growing interest in enterprise architecture management, researchers and practitioners lack a shared understanding of its applications in organizations. Building on findings from a literature review and eight case studies, we develop a taxonomy that categorizes applications of enterprise architecture management based on three classes of enterprise architecture scope. Organizations may adopt enterprise architecture management to help form, plan, and implement IT strategies; help plan and implement business strategies; or to further complement the business strategy-formation process. The findings challenge the traditional IT-centric view of enterprise architecture management application and suggest enterprise architecture management as an approach that could support the consistent design and evolution of an organization as a whole.

How Does Enterprise Architecture Support Innovation

Innovation is becoming increasingly important for Enterprise Architecture (EA) teams. Consequently, it is crucial that tools be developed to assist Enterprise Architecture teams when evaluating how (and how well) they are supporting innovation within the context of their enterprise. To date very little research has been completed that focuses on both EA and innovation. This paper presents an assessment tool to help EA teams evaluate and improve how they support innovation. The tool has been tested in a case study with a hi-tech firm and initial results are presented.