Ralph Foorthuis

Best practices for business and systems analysis in projects conforming to enterprise architecture

This paper aims to identify best practices for performing business and systems analysis in projects that are required to comply with Enterprise Architecture. We apply two qualitative research methods to study real-life projects conforming to architecture at Statistics Netherlands. First, a Canonical Action Research approach is applied to participate in two business process redesign projects. Second, we use Focus Group interviews to elicit knowledge about carrying out projects conforming to architecture. Based on this empirical research we present seven observations and ten best practices. The best practices point to the fact that project conformance is not only the responsibility of project members, but also of enterprise architects. Considering four levels of best practices (good idea, good practice, local best practice, industry best practice), we argue that our guidelines are located at the second (good practice) level. More research is required to prove or falsify them in other settings.

Achieving Enterprise Architecture Benefits: What Makes the Difference?

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is rapidly becoming an established discipline. However, this does not mean that the practice of EA is already fully standardized. Practitioners as well as researchers report various techniques being used in the EA practice. And although EA has various potential benefits, evidence of real benefits is only just emerging. This paper presents empirical evidence of the relations between EA techniques used and EA benefits perceived, as well as the influence of contextual factors. The evidence is based on the results of a survey (n=293) held among both architects and stakeholders of EA in a wide variety of organizations. Employing multivariate regression analysis we found that the combination of project compliance, EA choices being explicitly linked to business goals and organized knowledge exchange between architects is a strong predictor for EA being perceived as a good instrument. We also established that significant differences exist in EA practice effectiveness between different economic sectors. Government appears to reap less benefits from EA than other sectors. The empirical evidence furthermore shows only a small influence of organizational size and number of architects on EA effectiveness.

A theory building study of enterprise architecture practices and benefits

Academics and practitioners have made various claims regarding the benefits that Enterprise Architecture (EA) delivers for both individual projects and the organization as a whole. At the same time, there is a lack of explanatory theory regarding how EA delivers these benefits. Moreover, EA practices and benefits have not been extensively investigated by empirical research, with especially quantitative studies on the topic being few and far between. This paper therefore presents the statistical findings of a theory-building survey study (n = 293). The resulting PLS model is a synthesis of current implicit and fragmented theory, and shows how EA practices and intermediate benefits jointly work to help the organization reap benefits for both the organization and its projects. The model shows that EA and EA practices do not deliver benefits directly, but operate through intermediate results, most notably compliance with EA and architectural insight. Furthermore, the research identifies the EA practices that have a major impact on these results, the most important being compliance assessments, management propagation of EA, and different types of knowledge exchange. The results also demonstrate that projects play an important role in obtaining benefits from EA, but that they generally benefit less than the organization as a whole.

A Framework for Organizational Compliance Management Tactics

Organizational compliance with laws, industrial standards, procedures and enterprise architectures has become a highly relevant topic for both practitio ners and academics. However, both the fundamental insights into compliance as a concept and the tactics for bringing an organization into a compliant state have been described in a fragmented manner. Using literature from various disciplines, this paper presents two contributions. First, it describes the fundamental concepts regarding compliance. Second, it presents a framework in which the various tactics for achieving organizational compliance can be positioned.

An Artifact Model for Projects Conforming to Enterprise Architecture

This article presents a model for projects that have to adhere to Enterprise Architecture (EA) in order for their results to be aligned with the broader organization. The model features project artifacts (i.e. deliverables such as Software Architecture Documents), their mutual relationships, their relationship with EA, and the processes in which they are created and tested on conformance. We start with applying Activity Theory to show the crucial mediating role that artifacts have in projects and to identify and justify the new EA-related artifacts we introduce. We subsequently incorporate these findings and existing best practices in a standard systems development approach in order to create a practical model that projects can apply for EA conformance. This model features both new, dedicated EA artifacts, and well-known existing artifacts of which we describe the way they should conform to EA. Finally, two action research studies are used to empirically support the model.