Enterprise Architecture and Business Processes Analysis Minitrack

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10125/42531

This minitrack solicits paper submissions that: advance our knowledge of EA; help us learn about effective processes and approaches to effectively manage the EA and the EA development process; and begin to identify ways to measure the organizational benefits derived from EA.

Papers will be solicited in several areas, including, but not limited to the following:

  • Business Architecture description and development
  • Enterprise Business Process analysis
  • Agile Enterprise Architecture
  • Business Architecture process models
  • Architecting Processes, Methodologies and Practices
  • Architectural Frameworks and Theory
  • Tools and Techniques Supporting Architecting
  • Service-Oriented Architectures (including Web Services)
  • Enterprise Information Security Architectures
  • Addressing EA Management, Development, and Communication Challenges
  • Integration of EA with IT Governance
  • Using SOA to Implement an EA
  • Surveys and Case Studies
  • Assessing EA's Contribution to Organizational Success

Business Architecture Description and Development focuses on how to architecturally describe and model the business, its processes and operations. How does the business architecture drive and align the services and technology that the enterprise IT architectures specifies with the business goals, objectives and processes?


Architecting Processes, Methodologies and Practices focuses on how to develop enterprise IT architectures including: Architecture process coordination and collaboration challenges, agile and new methodologies, and case studies of existing methodologies, lessons learned, and descriptions of best practices in EA. Also of interest are papers describing metrics for assessing and evaluating development methodologies, comparisons of methodologies, and the assessment of architecture development teams.


Architectural framework and Theory focuses on methods of description of enterprise architectures. Several frameworks have been published notably the Zachman Framework, the TOGAF and the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF). New frameworks, extensions or modifications to existing frameworks, or theoretical results relating to enterprise architectures are of interest. Also of interest are papers describing metrics and quality attributes for assessing the “goodness” of an enterprise architecture and how to assess the return on investment of enterprise architecting.


Tools and Techniques for enterprise architecting are limited. Software architecture tools do not readily scale to enterprise-wide systems. Descriptions of new tools supporting frameworks, description, and methodologies for developing enterprise architectures as well as assessments of existing tools and techniques are of interest. Also of interest are formal methods (such as specification languages) for describing an EA that makes it amenable to logical validation and verification.


Enterprise Information Security: The trend to outsourcing an enterprise’s IT systems support – in whole or in part – has raised significant questions about information security. Software frameworks, such as SOA and virtualization, represent new vulnerabilities that need to be considered. Papers addressing information security as a strategic planning and policy challenge, as a pervasive attribute across EA, and as a specific implementation issue are solicited.


Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) focus on using web-enabled applications to provide services across distributed intranets and the Internet. The SOA model poses some difficult challenges in cost to user, reliability, accessibility, as well as the other -ilities. Papers addressing management and technical issues and challenges as well as successful implementations are also welcome.


EA Challenges: Challenges include modeling, maintaining, managing, and communicating the EA process and its deliverables. Papers are sought that address one or more of these challenges using innovative solutions. Process, performance, and economic metrics are a particularly thorny problem that needs to be addressed. Papers focusing on the integration of one or more software architectures/frameworks, such as SOA and virtualization techniques, into an enterprise architecture are solicited (particularly if they deal with resolution of interframework issues).


Surveys and Case Studies examine enterprise architecture development projects. Of particular interest are descriptions of how transitions from baseline to target architectures have been accomplished and an assessment of the results. Case studies describing EAs that have been implemented following the FEAF or the Zachman model are of special interest, including both process and performance metrics.


EA and Organizational Success: We are interested in papers that provide the conceptual foundations, methods, approaches and empirical studies related to the measurement of the organizational benefits of EA. Our research interviews with numerous participants, EA professionals and stakeholders is providing clear evidence that we know very little about how to evaluate the impact of EA on organizations.


Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Frank Armour (Primary Contact)
American University
Email: farmour@american.edu

Steve Kaisler
SHK & Associates
Email: Skaisler1@comcast.net

Browse

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 10 of 10
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    Understanding the Benefits and Success Factors of Enterprise Architecture
    (2017-01-04) Jusuf, Muhammad Baharudin; Kurnia, Sherah
    Enterprise Architecture (EA) is considered as a solution to reduce IT implementation failure, improve profitability and enhance business-IT alignment within organizations. However, explanations and evidence of EA benefits and success factors in the existing literature are still limited. Therefore, this study aims to explore how EA creates value to organizations through a qualitative study employing interviews with EA experts. This study contributes to the current knowledge of EA by providing a validated list of EA benefits and success factors. The study identified 40 EA benefits that are grouped into five categories (operational, managerial, strategic, IT infrastructure and organizational) and thirty-seven EA success factors categorized into product quality, infrastructure quality, service delivery quality and organizational anchoring. This study offers a number of implications for research and practice.
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    Object-Relational Mapping Revisited - A Quantitative Study on the Impact of Database Technology on O/R Mapping Strategies
    (2017-01-04) Lorenz, Martin; Rudolph, Jan-Peer; Hesse, Günter; Uflacker, Matthias; Plattner, Hasso
    Object-oriented applications often achieve persistence by using relational database systems. In such setup, object- relational mapping is used to link objects to tables. Due to fundamental differences between object-orientation and re- lational algebra, the definition of a mapping is a consider- ably difficult task. Today, there are only informal guidelines that support engineers in choosing the best mapping strategy. However, guidelines do not provide a quantification of actual impact and trade-off between different strategies. Thus, the decision on which mapping strategy should be implemented relies on a large portion of gut feeling. \ In this paper, we propose a framework and conduct a quan- titative study of the impact of object-relational mapping strate- gies on selected non-functional system characteristics. Our study creates awareness for consequences of using different mapping designs and persistence technologies. This allows developers to make distinctive and informed decisions, based on quantified results rather than gut feeling.
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    Institutionalization of Contested Practices: A Case of Enterprise Architecture Implementation in a US State Government
    (2017-01-04) Bui, Q. Neo; Levy, Matthew
    Information Systems (IS) practices are often ‘institutionally contested’ when introduced into organizations. They run counter to the status quo and disrupt organizational stability. Furthermore, they contravene the normative, regulatory, and cultural-cognitive legitimacy in existing institutionalized processes. This research explores contested practices, examining the struggles and techniques IS organizations use to legitimize and institutionalize them. Using an institutional change and translation perspective, we investigate a case of Enterprise Architecture (EA) implementations in a US state government, highlighting the struggles in translating new practices to connect to potential users and in connecting new practices to existing norms, regulations, and cultural values. We elucidate two key techniques to overcome these struggles: inductive communication to make new practices relatable to users, and the deployment of experts to local contexts to facilitate knowledge transfer. The research shows how institutional change unfolds and informs practitioners of how to legitimize EA practices.
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    Identifying Potential Problems and Risks in GQM+Strategies Models Using Metamodel and Design Principles
    (2017-01-04) Shimura, Chimaki; Washizaki, Hironori; Aoki, Yohei; Kobori, Takanobu; Honda, Kiyoshi; Fukazawa, Yoshiaki; Shintani, Katsutoshi; Nonomura, Takuto
    Although GQM+Strategies®1 assures that business goals and strategies are aligned throughout an organization and at each organizational unit based on the rationales to achieve the overall business goals, whether the GQM+Strategies grid is created correctly cannot be determined because the current definition of GQM+Strategies allows multiple perspectives when aligning goals with strategies. Here we define modeling rules for GQM+Strategies with a metamodel specified with a UML class diagram. Additionally, we create design principles that consist of relationship constraints between GQM+Strategies elements, which configure GQM+Strategies grids. We demonstrate that the GQM+Strategies grids can be automatically determined with the help of design principles described in OCL. In fact, an experiment is implemented using these approaches in order to show that this method helps identify and improve potential problems and risks. The results confirm that our approaches help create a consistent GQM+Strategies grid.
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    Enterprise Architecture Planning: Analyses of Requirements from Practice and Research
    (2017-01-04) Nowakowski, Emmanuel; Farwick, Matthias; Trojer, Thomas; Häusler, Martin; Kessler, Johannes; Breu, Ruth
    Enterprise architecture management (EAM) has become an increasingly important topic in practice due to the growing complexity of organizations and their underlying IT. While there is a strong interest in Enterprise Architecture (EA) modeling, evaluation, and frameworks, a lack of knowledge remains in the research field of EA planning. We conducted a series of expert interviews on the topic of EA planning. From these interviews we were able to extract requirements for EA planning from practice as the foundation of our analyses. Additionally, we conducted a structured literature review to elicit requirements for EA planning from a research perspective. This paper combines the results of both the practitioner interviews and the literature review to emphasize the gaps between the two worlds. As a result, we identified that current research does not adequately address the pressing problems of EA planning in practice.
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    Adaptive Service Composition Based on Runtime Verification of Formal Properties
    (2017-01-04) Medeiros Campos, Glaucia Melissa; Souto Rosa, Nelson; Ferreira Pires, Luis
    Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) has been used in business environments in order to integrate heterogeneous systems. The dynamic nature of these environments causes \ changes in the application requirements. As a result, service composition must be flexible, dynamic and adaptive, which motivate the need to ensure the service composition behavior \ at runtime. The development of adaptive service compositions is still an opportunity due to the complexity of dealing with adaptation issues, for example, how to provide runtime verification \ and automatic adaptation. Formal description techniques can be used to detect runtime undesirable behaviors that help in adaptation process. However, formal techniques have been \ used only at design-time. In this paper, we propose an adaptive service composition approach based on the lightweight use of formal methods. The aim is detecting undesirable behaviors in \ the execution trace. Once an undesirable behavior is detected during the execution of a service composition, our approach triggers an adequate reconfiguration plan for the problem at \ runtime. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposal, we illustrate it with a running example.
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    A Semi-Automatic Approach for Eliciting Cloud Security and Privacy Requirements
    (2017-01-04) Argyropoulos, Nikolaos; Shei, Shaun; Kalloniatis, Christos; Mouratidis, Haralambos; Delaney, Aidan; Fish, Andrew; Gritzalis, Stefanos
    Cloud computing provides a wide range of services to organisations in a flexible and cost efficient manner. Nevertheless, inherent cloud security issues make organisations hesitant towards the migration of their services to cloud. In parallel, the cloud service-oriented nature requires a specific and more demanding description of the business functional requirements intended for migration. Organisations need to transform their functional requirements based on a specific language, taking into account the respective non-functional requirements of the migrating services. Thus, the need for an approach that will holistically capture organisations' security and privacy requirements and transform them to cloud service requirements is immense. To this end, this paper presents an approach that takes as input abstract security and privacy requirements and produces through a semi-automatic process various alternative implementation options for cloud services. To achieve that a series of model transformations are utilised in order to create a mapping between the organisational and the operational level of the system's analysis.
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    A Connection of Task-centric with Artefact-centric Models through Semantic Task Specification and its Use for Formal Verification
    (2017-01-04) Popp, Roman; Hoch, Ralph; Kaindl, Hermann
    Task- and artefact-centric business process models (BPMs) are mostly used in isolation. This entails, e.g., problems with formal and automated verification of BPMs through model checking. We address this gap through semantic task specification, which is transferred from more widely known semantic service specification. In summary, we present a new and systematic approach for connecting a task-centric BPM (in BPMN) with a model of an artefact-centric object life cycle through semantic task specification. As a consequence, we achieve a seamless approach for formal and automated verification of BPMs using model checking.
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    15 Years of Enterprise Architecting at HICSS: Revisiting the Critical Problems
    (2017-01-04) Kaisler, Stephen; Armour, Frank
    The Enterprise Architecture (EA) minitrack has been a mainstay of HICSS for the past 15 years. The methodology, tools, and processes of enterprise architecting have evolved during that period. In 2005, Kaisler and Armour identified some critical challenges in modeling, management, and maintenance for EA that needed attention to ensure a viable technical discipline. Over 15 years, we have accepted 93 papers for presentation. Reviewing these papers and drawing up on our experience over the past 15 years, we conclude that some progress has been made, some challenges remain to be addressed, and some new challenges have emerged. This paper revises existing challenges and identifies additional challenges to be addressed in the next 10 years.
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