IT alone is no longer sufficient for business success. Companies need to control enterprise-wide processes and adopt matching actions. This paper presents an overview of existing approaches of Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM). By reasoning, the importance of integrated EAM for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) is underlines. The study is structured as a systematic literature review of papers published by selected journals and book series from 2006 till 2012.
It is essential to make the organization more sensitive towards the interaction of
business strategies, customers, application systems and organizational units. At the
same time there is no coherent architecture covering the majority of problems. [
Enterprise Architecture (EA) is the formal declaration of the basic structures of an
organization, its components and relations, as well as the processes used for
development. [
The objective of this paper is to identify the current research state of EAM, its terminology and its applicability for SMEs. The research approach is described in section 2, followed by the design of the systematic review. Some approaches from the selected papers are compared based on the aptitude for use in SME, after the research questions have been answered in section 4. The paper ends with a summary.
The research approach used by this paper is a methodological review of research results. The approach aims to be transparent, conclusive, and repeatable for the audience. The purpose of this paper is to summarize knowledge on EAM, to distinguish it from other terms of management disciplines, and finally to identify its applicability for SMEs.
We have conducted a systematic literature review based on the guidelines of
Kitchenham et al. [
The research proceeded in the following steps are recommended by B.Kitchenham: 1. Formulation of the research questions to define the important topics and relevant research fields. 2. Identification of literature sources covering EAM 3. Selection of papers for inclusion in the analysis 4. Data extraction from selected papers 5. Presentation of results 6. Interpretation of results
The remaining part of paper is organized by following these analysis steps.
To develop the role of EAM in research and practice, as well as in the context of SMEs, a literature selection was conducted and the result analyzed. This section describes the different steps of the systematic literature analysis.
The research questions (RQ) and expectations for answers addressed by this paper are: 1. How can Enterprise Architecture Management be classified? This question aims to clarify the tasks of EAM. It tries to illustrate the importance of several parts of an organization in accordance to the management methodology. 2. Are SMEs a target group of the EAM research? Are there any articles addressing
EAM directly in the context of SME? 3. What are the different research approaches? Are they using literature analysis, surveys, case studies or other kinds of research methods? 4. What are the limitations of this research with regard to the covered literature?
The initial search for appropriated literature sources itself was performed using the internet services Citeseer and Google Scholar and sorted by common ranking evaluation. Search terms like “enterprise architecture” and “enterprise architecture management”, as well as the corresponding German terms were used for the initial literature identification process. Based on the abstracts and reference lists of the initial matches the list of search terms was refined (e.g. “enterprise models) and additional journals as candidates for inclusion identified.
Overall we found ten journals covering the topic more than once; individual articles were not considered in the latter analysis. Furthermore, we selected journals based on the rank and the number of potentially relevant articles supplemented by two book series. The first one is Xpert.press, a book series following the popular journal with the same title. The second one, called Business Engineering, offers a whole book on the topic. Both of them are published in German.
The ranking was approached from the perspective of Information Systems
Research and not of Business Economics. The HMD journal for example only got a
“D” in the business oriented JOURQUAL [
The journals Wirtschaftsinformatik and HMD were chosen because of their
classification as popular journals of the Oldenbourg-Verlag by the Encyclopaedia of
Information Systems Research. [
Business Engineering is in contrast to other selected journals and book series not
restricted to business, but also includes articles of the cultural and political
implications. [
All editorial and scientific articles of the chosen sources are subject to a profound quality assurance including peer review. Except for the HMD, all sources are published via SpringerLink.
As period of time we used the last six years, ranging from 2006 till 2012. The majority of potentially relevant articles is from 2004 till 2012 and increases over the years. We curtailed the timeframe to analyze enough articles, while remaining up to date. Furthermore, we used a two-pronged approach to look for relevant papers.
Selection path A means selecting paper by matching with the primary keywords like “enterprise architecture”, “enterprise architecture management” and the corresponding German terms within the abstracts and bodies. These papers were directly selected. Selection path B includes all papers with several models of architecture and management disciplines. This is deeply rooted in the fact that EAM includes management disciplines like IT and Business Management. In the second phase papers were chosen, if they contained at least two different secondary keywords like “architecture” and “SME” and were not already selected as part of Selection A. The selection was reduced based on a cursory reading of the abstracts.
We found the majority of papers (> 300) in the Information System Frontiers. Nevertheless we just left five articles within our literature selection, which cover enterprise management disciplines and particularly SME. The search within the Wirtschaftsinformatik journal led to the smallest number of hits (17).
As a conclusion we started with 418 papers in the first iteration of literature sources. This was extended by 176 papers in the second iteration (section 3.2). Ultimately 35 papers were selected for this evaluation. Overall this constitutes 5,9% of our starting pool of 594 papers after the second iteration.
Different classifications of EAM are possible. [22, cp. p. 65] introduces EA as a
management instrument, because the EA has to be part of the classic management
processes in every organization. By comparison, [
The design and reorganization of architectures is consolidated as Architecture
Management. Furthermore it defines roles and responsibilities as well as the guidance
of participating employees. [
[3, cp. p. 189] divides Enterprise Architecture into two parts: the Organization
Architecture and the IT Architecture. The first one contains organizational structure
and business processes. The IT Architecture is influenced by the Information System
Architecture. Often the IT governance follows the business governance. [
EAM is divided into different layers by [12, p. 169]. He describes four layers with its functions: the strategy layer, the organization layer, the IT and Business Alignment layer and finally the IT layer. In contrast to this, the paper by [19, cp. p. 104] lists business architecture, process architecture, application architecture and IT architecture as the aspects to manage.
It is essential to manage and arrange the different aspects. Otherwise the enterprise
will not reach the reuse of models and a homogeneous archetype of matching
components. To build an EAM it is necessary to know the layers, where an
architecture takes effects. [
[14, p. 67 ff.] concentrates his research on the Architecture Management of
information systems. The management of information systems is divided into three
layers: the strategic one, the administrative one and the operative one. Information
Management concentrates as part of the Business Management with the identification
and best conversion of the IT potentials in solutions. [
At first it is remarkable, that there is no paper addressing EAM directly to SME.
Most of the examples in the articles are mentioned for large enterprises like the Credit
Suisse [
According to [31, cp. p. 55] the European Commission defines enterprises up to
250 employees with a yearly business volume of up to 50 million Euro or a balance
sheet total of up to 43 million Euro as SME. All others are considered large
enterprises. The management of SME is characterized as less comprehensive. As a
result corporative and operative planning are less formal and often do not exist in
written form. Furthermore SME are predestined for flexibility due to their flat
hierarchies, less bureaucratic structures as well as the direct inclusion of
decisionmakers. To make an enterprise-wide management possible the enterprise units have to
be involved in strategic decisions and several management disciplines have to be
differed. SME often operate in specialized markets where each product is highly
customized for this specific customer. SME are more sensitive to investment
decisions and often require more directly visible Return of Investment. As a
consequence many SME has heterogeneous, historically grown IT structures. [
Firstly, SME are not interested in EAM because of the complexity and price for
thedesign and management of EA. [
Secondly, models (e.g. maturity degree model) and tools have to be reduced to core
concepts to be usable by SME. [
Despite all these challenges, there are reasons for using EAM in SME. Firstly, the
distinction of management disciplines and its need is a subjective decision. Secondly,
security, availability and performance are aimed by every enterprise independently of
its size or industrial sector. The usage of EAM can take these goals forward. [
To summarize, the size of an enterprise does not determine whether it has a complex structure or not. In general “all industry enterprises, whose markets are affected by a high complexity of value creation, are concerned.” [45, p. 187]
After describing the topics investigated by the papers in the field of EAM in research question two, we sorted all papers of our research into the following categories. 1. Case study: Analysis of a specific use case with regard to this topic. 2. Survey: It is a research source, answering a research field, by questioning some stakeholders. 3. Theoretical work: Analysis of a research topic in a methodological way, possibly proving a solution problem, without direct application or experiments.
The emergence of research approaches is offers a lack of surveys (1). The majority of sources are of theoretical nature (24). Additionally some of these theoretical works were titled as analysis, but did not include literature reviews by definition. The second highest amount are case studies (10). They are mostly related to large enterprises.
The search was done using Google Scholar and Citeseer. Based on earlier studies it
was assumed that the full-text search provided by SpringerLink and the homepage of
HMD automatically searches for both British and American spelling. Derived from
the guidelines of Kitchenham et al. [
Thus, our results apply only to national German journals, highly ranked English journals and two additional book series to get more information. We focused on Information System and Business Engineering focused magazines. Individual articles were not considered in the analysis. As a result the decision may be biased. The classification of articles into main topics and management disciplines is not unique as formulations in the papers are often not clear enough. The timeframe was chosen to balance the number of potential papers and the currentness. Choosing a different timeframe affects both factors.
In this section four selected approaches (section 5.1) are compared in different aspects to highlight the similarities and differences. We want to identify a consistent understanding of EAM and its applicability for SME.
We selected four approaches from the 35 literature sources of this paper. They are
chosen because they used the terms “enterprise”, “architecture” and “management” in
the paper title. Two of these four papers, published by the Information System
Frontiers, belong together. [
[
Frontiers • Integrated view of business and IT is missing Framework for EAM tactical 2 1 3 operational 2 1 3 Tool support • EA models • EA frameworks • specific management of EAM • Portfolio mgmt. • management tools tools (e.g. for outsourcing) Implementat • Chief architect • All parts of the • Continuous positions ion by ... • Architecture office enterprise (first • Organizational units business, second IT) Recommend • Historical grown • Large organizations • Medium and large IT ed for ... application landscape • Large systems organizations • Complex systems
The three compared approaches are published in different journals. Their intention
of research in the field of EAM is caused by several reasons. [
The approaches agree that the stakeholder of EAM are various in number and
profession and can be inside or outside of the company. The importance of the results
for target groups is different. [
All of the approaches include different architectures in their approach. The
architectures defined by [
In summary, it is obvious that the focus of research in the field of EAM various
widely. All approaches mainly focus on large enterprises as they are used in
examples, as well as indirect proofs like naming complex systems. Nevertheless we
believe that all of them can be applied to medium-sized enterprises and all except for
[
The majority of research on EAM is done in theoretical work and case studies. All in all the discussion and usage of EAM is focused on IT in practice, although there is knowledge about the importance of processes, strategies and organizational aspects as well. Reasons are the continuous attention, cost, less experiences and expenses to integrate such an EAM model. There is not much work on implementing EAM in smaller enterprises, although some approaches would fit SMEs also. The connection between just business-focused and IT-focused managing has to be established in consideration to the dynamic environment, forcing for adaption and changing of enterprises. The different management disciplines are neither defined, nor used in a consistent manner. It is not clear, what the tasks and members of the management of an enterprise are. Management methods are not supposed to apply to specific company sizes, sectors or organizational units; they are supposed to be adaptable to different circumstances. For that reason companies have to be organized to provide a coherent, satisfying experience. To achieve this, processes and organizational structures have to be aligned, covering all elements, relationships and dependencies in every part of a company.