Lecture 3.1 EAM Motivation and Overview Flashcards
Which challenges need to be faced when managing application landscapes?
IT lies in dense fog
- business criticizes low benefit of IT
Lack of interest of management
Unclear responsibilities
What often happens when platform functionality is increased?
Often the platform efficiency then decreases. Then a platform replacement is needed, which is often not possible
How to balance efficiency and functionality?
Managed evolution. You make incremental improvements so that the functionality does not deteriorate too fast.
What is system complexity?
number, variety, and dynamicity of elements and their dependencies
How to reduce system complexity?
- Differentiation between necessary and unnecessary complexity
- Aligning the IT architecture with the future business architecture
- Coherent transformation through coordinated IT projects
What does IT Architecture Management do?
reduce the IT Landscape complexity surplus
What does Business Architecture Management do?
reduce the business complexity surplus
What is an enterprise architecture?
It concerns the vertical and horizontal dependencies between business capabilities, business services, and infrastructure services
How many models does EAM use?
at least 3
What are the EAM models?
- current state of the EA
- planned state of the EA derived from planned and budgeted projects for transforming the EA until a certain point in time.
- target state of the EA describes an ideal state to be pursued according to the strategies and architectural principles of the organization
What should the business architecture model focus on?
The current stakeholders and their information demands
Stakeholder –> Concern (information demand) –> Viewpoint –> Model
Do you ever see EAM in its entirety?
No, only from a certain perspective
Reflect & Adapt cycle for EAM and its influence factors
Develop and Describe ->
Communicate and Enact ->
Analyze and Evaluate
influenced by:
- enterprise context
- organizational context
- EAM goals
- EAM questions
- maturity of other IT management functions
Does EAM have to be integrated with other management functions?
Yes, architectural changes are performed through a coherent set of projects
Which position does a company strive to be in in a customer centric business network?
Platform provider/ coordinator
–> integration of all services e.g. Car2Go
What is results oriented control and management?
Digital devices enable companies to create new forms of controlling their own business.
The outcome economy shifts the focus from selling things to selling results.
–> E.g. from the sale of a book to reading habits (kindle)
Old is a company-centric design of the IT architecture. What is the new version?
Outside-in thinking. Here the IT architecture is based on the future skills of partners and customers.
To which new priorities does digitalization lead in the design of IT application landscapes?
Now the requirements of organizations are more focused on flexibility and connectivity than on functionality
What does service-oriented application landscape architecture look like?
- separation of front-end and back-end systems
- modularization of back-end systems
- flexible and fault-tolerant coupling via service interfaces
ESB
Enterprise service bus = an architecture for integrating many applications together
How to separate customer channel systems in the modular service-oriented application landscape architecture
- separation of internal ESB and external bus based on IT
- return channels are powerful data analysis systems
- systems for modelling and managing dynamic service networks
What are the 3 EAM schools of thought?
- Enterprise IT Architecture
- Enterprise Integration
- Enterprise Ecological Adaptation (most modern)
What is Enterprise IT Architecture about?
- EA is the glue between business and IT
- support IT planning, reduce costs
- apply a reductionist (mechanistic) stance
What is Enterprise Integration about?
- EA is the link between strategy and execution
- support organizational coherence
- holistic (system) stance
- enable significant organ. efficiency
What is Enterprise Ecological Adaptation about?
- EA is the means for organizational innovation and sustainability
- encourage system-in-environment coevolution
- environment can be changed -> jointly design all organizational dimensions
Limitation of Enterprise IT Architecture
- can produce inadequate or unfeasible solutions for the larger organizational context.
- struggles with solution acceptance and implementation barriers.
- susceptible to perfect designs that support unsustainable strategies
Limitation of Enterprise Integrating
- susceptible to perfect design that supports unsustainable strategies
- requires paradigm shift from reductionism to holism
Limitation of Ecological Adaptation
- requires many organizational preconditions for management and strategy creation
