Assessment on Enterprise Architecture and Methodologies

Abstract

From the beginning of my professional work as a researcher and consultant in the area of enterprise architectures I found that enterprises are facing new challenges to maintain and improve their market-share and their competitiveness. These new challenges mean that they have to respond in a more agile and precisely way to new customer requirements. These customer requirements have to be identified with no doubts by answering questions like where, when, how and what needs are needed to be satisfied in an enterprises by focusing in their expertise in order to adapt their business processes to be able to respond to the customer requirements. According with Professor Williams (Williams, 1996) architectures can be of either two types. Type I presents a pictorial description or model of the physical organization or structure and Type II describes or models the steps of the process of development of enterprise integration. Actual research in heading to define the content and the structure of any organization, in terms of architecture structure (Type II), content, definitions and other aspects that define what is an enterprise. With the knowledge developed on Enterprise Architecture (Type II) no more questions will come from the people in charge of defining the business processes in terms of what to model and how to model in an enterprise. This knowledge is known as "Enterprise Architecture and Methodology" and is already defined as an ISO standard (ISO 15704, ISO 19439 & ISO 19440). So this thesis is using the ISO standard to structure a serial of matrices that will help an enterprise and their stakeholders and practitioners to find out what is missing in its enterprise model. The thesis does not intent to say what aspects are better to fulfill in a specific enterprise mission, but to establish that lacks that contain the aspects that are weaknesses to obtain the enterprise performance and competitiveness. The reader will find a complete methodology to perform an assessment and discover those weaknesses in its enterprise model. Also it will find a study case that will give an example of what to expect from the assessment proposed. But remember it is not the intention to give guidelines of what to improve to fulfill an enterprise mission, just to show the gaps in a particular enterprise model against the standard.