How do senior leaders conceive and re-architect their enterprises?

Abstract

This research proposes enhancements to the Enterprise Architecture Method developed by Nightingale and Rhodes. By Enterprise Architecting we consider the following definition: "applying holistic thinking to design, valuate and select a preferred structure for a future state enterprise to realize its value proposition, and desired behaviors." (Nightingale & Rhodes, 2011) In this thesis we will focus on the steps needed to design the enterprise "To Be" Architecture. We try to find an answer to how senior leaders conceive and re-architect their enterprises. We propose five prescriptive steps to follow in the pre-architecting stage of the enterprise, and four steps to follow in the design of the "To Be" alternatives. Those steps enable a systematic process that assures the architect that all the main issues of candidate generation are covered, as well as, it helps to bring new and fresh ideas in the design phase of the Enterprise. Those steps are included in a broader method called the Enterprise Architecting Method for Generating and Evaluating Potential Future States (EAMGE), a systematic technique to guide enterprise leaders to make better decisions when deciding a future architecture when employing an enterprise transformation process. The method follows a spiral model of design that leads to more refined architectures. It allows to understand alternatives as well as estimate effectiveness, effort and risk for different alternatives and analyzes tradeoffs among them, leading to a more informed decision making process. Future work (is undergoing) will provide the evaluations stages proposed by EAMGE and will complement the steps proposed in this thesis.