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To learn more about the topic and to co-create its purpose, goals, and research plan, join our A2E2 Workshop on Friday, September 27, 2019. Invitation to the workshop will be sent to all on the mailing list. 

About A2E2

Digital data and technologies have had and continue to have a profound impact on business and operating models. Pervasive digitalization has transformed traditional value chains, disrupted entire industries, enabled new digital platforms, and changed the very logic of contemporary business. Social media and mobile computing have brought about a deluge of data, advanced analytics technologies and artificial intelligence have revolutionized the utilization of these big data, and the ubiquitous Cloud infrastructure has enabled virtually unlimited computing power to run the digital business.

In the face of digital disruption, the traditional approach to Enterprise Architecture is rendered obsolete.

The Adaptive Architecture for Extended Enterprise (A2E2) program is aimed at studying the impact of digitalization and coevolutionary ecosystemic context on the research and practice of enterprise architecture. The foremost benefit for the partaking case organizations is practical development of their enterprise architecture capability. This is done by applying theoretically informed adaptive enterprise structures, architectural frameworks and enterprise architecture practices in an action research fashion. To allow comparisons within and across industries, we will also design and run questionnaires and expert panels to survey the state of enterprise architecture capability in the case organizations.

Enterprise architecture started as “the glue between business and IT” (Lapalme, 2011), as the implementations of information systems had increased in size and complexity to the extent that coherence needed to be imposed through an architectural approach. This Enterprise IT Architecting (EITA) school focused on enterprise IT assets, aimed at business-IT alignment, operational efficiency and IT cost reduction. IT planning was seen as a rational, deterministic process and the role of the enterprise architect as the master planner/designer.

More recently, enterprise architecture has been understood in the scope of Extended Architecture (Doucet et al., 2008): encompassing all the dimensions of the enterprise, not just IT. Architecture methods and tools are used to capture strategic goals and related business requirements to design the enterprise. The respective Enterprise Integrating (EI) school (Lapalme, 2011) views enterprise architecture as the link between strategy and execution.

Few EA frameworks, however, provide support for adaptation to fast-moving environ­ments characterized by complex enterprise ecosystems and value networks. To continuously adapt to the changing business, information, social and technological landscape requires a fundamental shift in the way EA is conceived and contrived (Korhonen et al., 2016). The emerging Enterprise Ecological Adaptation (EEA) school of thought adopts the point of departure that the enterprise and its environment are coevolving and can be systemically designed so that the organization is “conducive to ecological learning, environmental influencing and coherent strategy execution” (Lapalme, 2011).

In our prior research (Korhonen and Halén, 2017), we have identified that the new digital environment calls for an adaptive enterprise architecture that enables rapid dispatch and reconfiguration of modular capabilities and resources, both internally and externally. It would support all phases of the adaptive loop (Haeckel, 1999): 1) real-time surveillance of external and internal environments (sense); 2) continuous evaluation of the organization’s value proposition, value creation, and value appropriation (interpret); 3) ability to make decisions quickly (decide); 4) and ability to reconfigure and orchestrate infrastructure and services across the ecosystem (act).

Sign up to our mailing list and join the program!

To learn more about the topic and to co-create its purpose, goals, and research plan, join our A2E2 Workshop on Friday, September 27. Invitation to the workshop will be sent to all on the mailing list. 

References

Doucet, G., Gøtze, J., Saha, P. & Bernard, S. (2008). Coherency management: Using enterprise architecture for alignment, agility and assurance. Journal of Enterprise Architecture, 4(2), 1–12.

Haeckel, S. (1999). Adaptive Enterprise. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Korhonen, J. J., Lapalme, J., McDavid, D. & Gill, A. Q. (2016). Adaptive Enterprise Architecture for the Future: Towards a Reconceptualization of EA. The 18th IEEE Conference on Business Informatics (CBI 2016), 29 August – 1 September, Paris, France.

Korhonen, J. J. & Halén, M. (2017). Enterprise Architecture for Digital Transformation. The 19th IEEE Conference on Business Informatics (CBI 2017), 24–26 July, Thessaloniki, Greece.

Lapalme, J. (2011). Three schools of enterprise architecture. IT Professional, 14(6), 37–43.