Businesses of all sizes are constantly seeking to improve their daily business processes to stay competitive in the modern-day economy. Enterprises take for granted that they are utilizing their business capabilities in the best way possible. The purpose of this paper is to present a manual method to minimize the gap of misalignment between business and IT when delivering enterprise application software (EAS) projects in an agile environment. The research is based on literature review and empirical data from 3 EAS projects over a one-year time. By introducing a regular reference check to minimize the gap of misalignment between business and IT or deficit, during EAS project delivery between the requirements and strategical organizational goals described using enterprise architecture frameworks, specifically Archimate, it was observed that cost of projects and overall enterprise effort towards its goals decreased and provided significant cost savings. A more automated approach than previously available is required.
Business strategy execution has been identified as a problem a long time ago. In 2008
R.S. Kaplan and D.P. Norton presented their book “Execution Premium: Linking
Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage” [
Business strategy execution has a direct impact on utilizing business capabilities.
Organizational capability in the context of business capability dates back to 1987 when
Ulrich [
There are various researches on how business strategy execution could be supported
in utilizing IT capabilities. Henderson and Venkatraman presented business strategy
alignment with the IT strategy model thus providing an analysis method aimed for
competitive advantage [
Quite often business strategy execution is based on various project implementation. Usually, agile approach is used to achieve organizational goals or deliver the value for the customer and improve time to market for IT-related product development whether it is a new entertainment application or complex IT system. However, using an agile approach means business decisions need to be taken quickly, on-demand when the development team needs to know business decisions that impact their product or project development. Such a quick pace means that business must be always ready to provide support to IT development, and if it’s not, that might cause IT development to be stopped because it is not aligned with organizational goals as identified in business strategy and captured in enterprise architecture frameworks.
This paper is structured as follows. In the second section, the basic concepts of enterprise architecture, enterprise agile software development are presented. In the third section, related works are described. The fourth section contains the concept of deficit in business strategy and enterprise application software project delivery and a method to minimize it. In the fifth section, the case study using the suggested method is explained. Finally, conclusions cover the overview of results and summarize the case study. 2 2.1
Organizational capabilities and overall organizational “map” from the as-is situation and to-be situation perspective is best described using enterprise architecture frameworks.
Enterprise architecture is a well-defined framework for conducting enterprise
analysis, design and implementation of relevant IT necessary to execute their strategies, to
guide organizations through the business and technology changes. The history of
“Enterprise Architecture” as a concept started in 1987 when John Zachman coined the term
[
The agile approach for software development is becoming an increasingly popular software development methodology. Agile approach could be used not only in software development but in most product development-oriented business cases. So-called traditional or “waterfall” project management approach becomes less and less efficient when it comes to accepting changes that emerge during the lifetime of the project.
As Pikkarainen et al. states [
As Portman has described in his book “Scaling agile in organizations - Guide for
project managers and agile leaders” agile has over 15 different frameworks [
There is a significant number of research done in the IT and business alignment area
where the starting point could be identified in Henderson’s and Venkatraman’s
alignment framework distinguishing two alignment dimensions (business strategy and IT
strategy) [
Other approach is service-oriented architecture (SOA) based methods like BITAM
by Chen et al. [
However, most of the suggested methods take significant time to evaluate the misalignments, and although they provide metrics to track misalignments, models still needs to be translated to project requirements or the requirements themselves should be adjusted manually, therefore more automated solution is demanded. 4
As mentioned, Scrum is one of the most popular agile software development methodologies. To successfully run agile-based projects, it requires business representatives to have timely decisions to provide input for upcoming development iterations to maintain optimal pace of development as soon as any questions impacting development arise. In Scrum, this is done by a person called the product owner. But this usually takes time for that person to seek out information and provide it to the development team. Sometimes the answers or priorities change over time which is natural, also that might result in development delays or some part of work redone. These situations can be identified as a deficit in the EAS project and enterprise architecture alignment (Fig. 1) Enterprise architecture frameworks, specifically Archimate, has capability modelling notation therefore it is available for presenting business capabilities in a standardized way. It also contains sufficient elements to translate business strategy through capability utilization to be able to be used as indicators for answering EAS project delivery questions such as priorities, guidelines for requirements.
The model in the example in Fig. 2 shows a brief example of how strategical goals could be modelled using organizational capabilities. This further can be modelled for answering questions regarding EAS project delivery.
If there would be a regular check during EAS project sprint, the impact of the deficit would be reduced. This should be done on each development iteration during product backlog refinement sessions by validating the product backlog items against enterprise business strategy through enterprise architecture models from Archimate framework.
The diagram of the Scrum process and deficit has even bigger impact on enterprise agile frameworks, like Scaled agile framework (SAFe) (Fig. 3). In SAFe the whole organization is committed to deliver business value through aligned timeframes where each team is contributing to the overall goal with their skills and capabilities. Therefore, the impact of team not being presented with timely and precise answers required to create the next product increment is multiplied by the number of teams involved in a Scaled agile framework setup.
In order to minimize the issues of delays in product delivery or work to be redone due to changed priorities, it is suggested to constantly advise against business strategy goals and their representation in enterprise architecture models, specifically Archimate. Parameter Initial requirements Change requests Bugs Project duration
Project #1 138 273 135 8 months Parameter Initial requirements Change requests Bugs
Project #1 138 238 107 8 months
Once delivering projects in a SAF’e Agile framework environment there were observations done on 3 EAS projects. The requirements in the format of user stories, change requests and bugs were analyzed during the project lifecycle of 8 to 12 months. The results are displayed in Table 1 below.
When manually using the suggested method to minimize deficit in business strategy execution and EAS development project delivery the data was analyzed and findings are displayed in Table 2.
As it was observed, the initial set of requirements did not change due to the fact, that the deficit between business strategy execution and EAS development project delivery arises during sprints or product development. But in change request and bugs categories, the differences are quite significant as in the 1st project the number of bugs was reduced by more than 20 % and in project 3 the number of change requests was reduced by more than 16 %. The comparison results are displayed in Table 3.
The savings observed should be evaluated based on their required development effort and based on the average hourly cost of developer, the cost savings can be calculated. 6
Enterprise architecture is becoming the most efficient way to capture organization strategy, capabilities and overall assets as it has clear rules how the information about the organization should be structured.
Agile software methodology is already popular for some time but still gaining popularity across product development based organizations and new ways of working are being developed for teams, departments and whole enterprises.
Given that, the before mentioned areas are still subject for further research. By observing Scrum usage for EAS project delivery under the Scaled Agile Framework and Archimate enterprise architecture framework there was a deficit identified in alignment between business strategy and IT project execution in an agile environment and a method provided to minimize the deficit. This resulted in part of work not needed to be redone anymore and some previously missed requirements, that needed to be done in order to reach project and business goals, done on time. Also, significant cost savings were observed. Further automation is to be researched as it is possible to utilize the method, presented in this paper, more seamlessly.
Acknowledgements. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor professor Saulius Gudas for timely and valuable insights during the preparation of this paper.