Elsevier

Computers in Industry

Volume 79, June 2016, Pages 87-102
Computers in Industry

Enterprise engineering and management at the crossroads

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compind.2015.07.010Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Challenges to future EIS due to business, socio-economic, and ecological environment complexity.

  • Fundamental limitations to the controllability of complex systems as a challenge to sustainability.

  • Complexity management and complexity reduction methods.

  • State of the art of promising relevant areas of computing and communication.

Abstract

The article provides an overview of the challenges and the state of the art of the discipline of Enterprise Architecture (EA), with emphasis on the challenges and future development opportunities of the underlying Information System (IS), and its IT implementation, the Enterprise Information System (EIS). The first challenge is to overcome the narrowness of scope of present practice in IS and EA, and re-gain the coverage of the entire business on all levels of management, and a holistic and systemic coverage of the enterprise as an economic entity in its social and ecological environment. The second challenge is how to face the problems caused by complexity that limit the controllability and manageability of the enterprise as a system. The third challenge is connected with the complexity problem, and describes fundamental issues of sustainability and viability. Following from the third, the fourth challenge is to identify modes of survival for systems, and dynamic system architectures that evolve and are resilient to changes of the environment in which they live. The state of the art section provides pointers to possible radical changes to models, methodologies, theories and tools in EIS design and implementation, with the potential to solve these grand challenges.

Section snippets

Introduction: Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise Information Systems

The past forty years have seen the emergence of the field of Enterprise Architecture (EA), originating in the management, engineering and information systems disciplines, due to the need to create enterprise integration, whereupon the enterprise is considered an information and material processing system (or system of systems to be precise) interacting with its environment, through a permeable boundary. The meaning of the enterprise's activities arises from its interactions in an economic,

The challenge of scope

As it was pointed out in Section 1, there is a gap between the originally intended scope and present day scope of EA practice. The scope of EA is not necessarily one single enterprise, but any socio-technical system. For example, EA practice has been successfully applied to design networks of enterprises, virtual organisations, government transformation, etc., and the same can be applied to entire industries, or government.

Even though EA can be considered the systems science of enterprise, it

State of the art

In this section we overview developments that contribute, or have potential to contribute, to the solution of the challenges described in Section 2. Fig. 1 summarises these relationships; as it can be seen this relationship is N:M, not 1:1, namely to address the challenges, multiple developments are necessary on several fronts. E.g., to solve the challenges of scale and complexity, both the systems science approach, including modern soft systems theories and methods (Section 3.4), and hard

Conclusions and future research directions

According to the definition of EIS given in the introduction of this paper, the evolution of EIS is in fact a view of the evolution of the architecture of the enterprise. Therefore it is not possible to overcome current limitations in isolation unless the solutions are embedded in the Enterprise Architecture discipline. As a consequence, EIS evolution and EA evolution are intrinsically connected.

In summary then, a scoping statement for a future proposed research agenda for next generation

Acknowledgements

This work was a collaborative effort between eleven authors from five continents, some with academic, some with industry and government experience as practitioners, managers or consultants, and many with both. Our analysis and predictions were influenced by a large number of cited authors, and was also leaning on the work of past leaders of the Enterprise Integration and Enterprise Architecture communities. We also received inspiration from international communities and working groups in which

Peter Bernus is an Associate Professor in the School of Information and Communication Technology at Griffith University. He has worked internationally on various aspects of enterprise integration as researcher, consultant and project leader for industry, government and defense. His current interests include inter- and intra-organisational management, global enterprise networks and dynamic virtual organisations, lately working on complexity management in enterprise architecture, innovation,

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    Peter Bernus is an Associate Professor in the School of Information and Communication Technology at Griffith University. He has worked internationally on various aspects of enterprise integration as researcher, consultant and project leader for industry, government and defense. His current interests include inter- and intra-organisational management, global enterprise networks and dynamic virtual organisations, lately working on complexity management in enterprise architecture, innovation, preparedness building to improve the success rate of mergers and acquisitions, and fundamental research of long term decision making for sustainability in light of sparse information. He is foundation chaIr of IFIP WG5.12 and past chair of the IFIP-IFAC Task Force for Architectures for Enterprise Integration, that developed the generalised enterprise reference architecture and methodology, series co-editor of the International Handbooks on Information Systems for Springer-Verlag, and member of the editorial boards of several international journals.

    Ted Goranson led the DARPA research programs in concurrent engineering, semiconductor manufacturing and military system pilot programs and was project lead on agility and virtual enterprise programs. Prior to that, he was senior scientist for a research lab working similar issues for the intelligence community. Currently, he heads work on next generation integration technology for Sirius-Beta based on narrative cognition, situation theory and reactive coding of geometric logics. His education is from MIT.

    Dr. John Gøtze is an Assistant Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen and an external lecturer at Copenhagen Business School. John is also Editor-in-Chief for QualiWare Center of Excellence. He has worked with digitalization since the 1980s, as a doctoral researcher, a civil servant and a consultant. In the early 2000s, he introduced enterprise architecture in the Danish government, and has over the years co-authored several central policy documents, international standards, and national enterprise architecture frameworks and methodologies as well as co-published several books. He became an accredited instructor of Carnegie Mellon University's Certified Enterprise Architect Program in 2006, and has since certified hundreds of Danish, Belgian, Greenlandic, and many other nationals. He has also been running a popular enterprise architecture course at the IT University of Copenhagen for over ten years.

    Anders Jensen-Waud is a strategy consultant with Strategy& (formerly Booz & Company), a global strategy and management consulting firm. He specalises in strategy and operating model transformation within financial services, insurance, and energy, where he helps his clients maximise cost efficiency, streamline their operating models, and explore new sources of revenue to fuel growth. Prior to joining Strategy&, Anders worked as a management consultant focusing on enterprise architecture and IT strategy development, aerospace & defense systems engineer, and integration architect. He holds an MSc and BSc in Business Administration & Computer Science from Copenhagen Business School and has also conducted postgraduate studies (by government scholarship) at the University of Sydney Business School. Anders has published a number of peer-reviewed papers and is also co-author and editor of the book ‘Beyond Alignment: Applying Systems Thinking in Architecting Enterprises’, a comprehensive reading about how enterprises can apply systems thinking in their enterprise architecture practice, for business transformation and for strategic execution. Anders’ academic research interests include strategic planning, enterprise architecture, cybernetics, and philosophy of science.

    Dr. Hadi Kandjani is an Assistant Professor of Information Technology Management at Shahid Beheshti University in Iran. He is also an Adjunct Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems in the Centre for Enterprise Architecture Research and Management at Griffith University in Australia. He received his PhD in Enterprise Architecture from Griffith University and teaches courses in enterprise architecture, information systems and information technology design, planning & governance, and e-services. Interests: enterprise modelling, enterprise architecture, integration and Interoperability, control and management of enterprises as complex systems, systems thinking, and cybernetics. He has published several papers in design, control and management of enterprises (including Collaborative Networks) as complex systems using enterprise architecture cybernetics, and is involved in extending the enterprise architecture body of knowledge to highly complex enterprise problems.

    Dr. Arturo Molina is Professor of Tecnologico de Monterrey, member of the National Researchers System of Mexico (SNI-Nivel II), Mexican Academy of Sciences, Mexican Academy of Engineering, Member of the IFAC WG 5.3 Enterprise Integration and Networking, IFIP WG5.12 Working Group on Enterprise Integration Architectures and IFIP WG 5.3 Cooperation of Virtual Enterprises and Virtual Organizations. He is the author of over 100 scientific papers in journals, conferences, chapter books and 4 patents. He is co-author of the following books “Life Cycle Engineering: Concepts, models and technologies” (Kluwer Academics Publishers), “Concurrent Engineering: an integrated methodology” (in Spanish, UPC publications), “Artificial Organic Networks Artificial Intelligence Based on Carbon Networks, Studies in Computational Intelligence” (Springer), “Greenhouse Design and Control” (CRC Press) and “Fundamentos de LabVIEW” (In Spanish, Alfaomega).

    Ovidiu Noran has a PhD in Enterprise Architecture, a BEng (Hons) degree in HVAC and Master degrees in ICT and in Learning and Teaching Higher Education. Dr. Noran has worked as an engineer and architecture consultant in companies based in Europe and Australia and is currently lecturing Enterprise Architecture, Database Design and Systems Analysis and Design at Griffith University. He is a member of Engineers Australia, Association of Enterprise Architects and standardisation committees such as ISO/IEC SC7/WG42 and ISO TC184 SC5/WG1. His research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Serious Games, Software Engineering and Enterprise Architecture and he prefers Action Research.

    Dr. Ricardo J. Rabelo is an Associate Professor of the Automation and Systems Department at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil since 2000, where he leads GSIGMA – the Intelligent Manufacturing Systems ∑ Collaborative Networks group. He obtained his PhD in Robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing from the New University of Lisbon, Portugal, in 1997. His current areas of interest include: collaborative networks, service oriented architectures, enterprise architecture and integration, innovation, governance and performance evaluation. Dr. Rabelo has been involved in many international research projects and program committees of international conferences. He is member of IFIP WG5.5 (Collaborative Networks) and IFAC TC5.3 (Enterprise Integration and Networking).

    David Romero is Senior Research Scientist and Scientific Project Manager at Tecnológico de Monterrey, currently acting as leader of the Sustainable Process Industry & Industrial Ecology (SPRING) research line at the Centre for Innovation in Design and Technology, National Graduate School of Science and Engineering. He is former Director of Strategic Partnerships for Knowledge Generation and Transfer at Vice-presidency for Research, Postgraduate Studies and Continuous Education at the same university. He previously occupied different executive director positions in the Departments of R&D, entrepreneurship, innovation and technology management, and business incubation, acceleration and technology transfer. David is also completing a PhD in Enterprise Architecture from Griffith University, holds a Master's Degree in Information Technologies Management, with Knowledge Management and Business Informatics Management specialities, and a BS in Computer Systems for Management from Tecnológico de Monterrey. David has led and participated in various international research projects and consulting services on: Enterprise Architectures, Integration, Interoperability and Networking and Collaborative Networked Organizations. He is member of the IFAC TC5.3 on Enterprise Integration and Networking and the IFIP WG5.12 on Enterprise Integration Architectures, and published over 70 journal and international conference papers and serves at different editorial and scientific boards in the disciplines of business and industrial engineering.

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