-
Lack of e ective involvement of stakeholders is one of the common drawbacks of
enterprise architecture development [
1
]. This paper, therefore, focuses on
challenges associated with involving stakeholders in the enterprise architecture e ort.
These challenges are mainly caused by two issues, i.e.: (a) the success of
collaborative sessions that involve enterprise architects and stakeholders mainly depends
on the presence of a professional or skilled facilitator; (b) the lack of a clear,
predictable, and repeatable way of managing tasks that require e ective and active
stakeholder involvement. Earlier attempts to overcome these issues involve
using Collaboration Engineering to develop a process that enterprise architects
can execute (by themselves) so as to manage tasks that require e ective
collaboration with stakeholders during enterprise architecture creation. Collaboration
Engineering was chosen because it o ers a ordable facilitation to practitioners
(in this case enterprise architects) of recurring high-value tasks (like enterprise
architecture creation), by enabling the development of repeatable processes that
practitioners can execute without hiring a professional facilitator [
2,5
].
According to [
5
], a collaborative process for a given task is designed using the
following procedure: specifying the goal and deliverables of the process; de ning
the activities that participants must execute so as to achieve the goal;
specifying the reasoning phases participants must undergo in order to achieve the
goal; and describing detailed facilitation support for each activity. Facilitation
support is speci ed by articulating: (a) the Group Support System (GSS) tools
that should be used (or alternative techniques) during the collaborative
sessions; (b) how the tools should be con gured; and (c) the message prompts that
should be followed [
2
]. This design approach was adapted when formulating the
collaboration process for e ectively involving stakeholders during enterprise
architecture creation. This process is herein referred to as Collaborative Evaluation
of Enterprise Architecture Design Alternatives (CEADA). The earlier version of
CEADA was evaluated in a eld study (of ve organizations) where it was e
ective in supporting activities that required stakeholders to brainstorm, prioritize
or rank or rate concerns and requirements for the architecture; and perform
multi-criteria evaluation of possible enterprise architecture design alternatives.
However, CEADA was still lacking adequate support for stirring vigorous and
rigorous discussions when executing activities that required stakeholders and
architects to reduce and organize aspects from brainstorming activities; and assess
possible interrelationships and implications. This was re ected in the feedback
from stakeholders who participated in the sessions supported by CEADA; the
facilitator; and the observer of the sessions.
Since the main focus of this research is to o er e ective stakeholder
involvement in architecture creation, in this paper we address the above weakness by
supplementing CEADA with techniques for enhancing the creation of a shared
understanding and vision during execution of activities that involve
organizing and discussing brainstormed aspects. We focus on adapting Soft Systems
Methodology (SSM) because of its reputation for managing complex and
illstructured organizational problems through structuring rational thinking about
them [
3
]. SSM techniques can be adapted to supplement the design of the
collaboration process with support for triggering discussions and creating a shared
understanding and vision among stakeholders. We also adapt the cause-e ect
analysis diagram (or Fishbone or Ishikawa) technique because of its support
for thorough problem analysis [
4
]. Since SSM o ers implicit facilitation support
for collaborative workshops or discussion debates among problem owners and
solver(s), Collaboration Engineering is further used in designing the facilitation
script that shows how SSM and Ishikawa techniques can be used in enterprise
architecture creation. Thus, in this paper CEADA is extended by a script that
provides facilitation support for using SSM and Ishikawa diagram techniques to
execute activities that require the use of clarify and organize patterns of
reasoning.