Now showing 1 - 10 of 52
  • Publication
    Service-Oriented Business-IT Alignment: A SOA Governance Model
    (The International Association for Information, Culture, Human and Industry Technology (AICIT), ) ;
    Wentland, Maia
    The concept of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has had a significant impact not only on software engineering but on the analysis of an organization’s business layer as well. It contributes to developing information systems that are compatible with the needs of agile organizations. This fact brings us to investigate the new approach of Business-IT Alignment (BITA) by utilizing SOA features. In this paper we will first examine the importance of SOA in both business and IT perspectives. We will proceed by showing the SOA governance as a roadmap for bringing the concept of SOA in the context of BITA (as one of the major IT challenges). Finally, we will propose a SOA Governance Model (SOAGM) that should help aligning IT investments with business strategies.
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  • Publication
    The impact of enterprise architecture management on information systems architecture complexity
    Significant investments in information systems (IS) over the past decades have led to increasingly complex IS architectures in organisations, which are difficult to understand, operate, and maintain. We investigate this development and associated challenges through a conceptual model that distinguishes four constituent elements of IS architecture complexity by differentiating technological from organisational aspects and structural from dynamic aspects. Building on this conceptualisation, we hypothesise relations between these four IS architecture complexity constructs and investigate their impact on architectural outcomes (i.e., efficiency, flexibility, transparency, and predictability). Using survey data from 249 IS managers, we test our model through a partial least squares (PLS) approach to structural equation modelling (SEM). We find that organisational complexity drives technological complexity and that structural complexity drives dynamic complexity. We also demonstrate that increasing IS architecture complexity has a significant negative impact on efficiency, flexibility, transparency, and predictability. Finally, we show that enterprise architecture management (EAM) helps to offset these negative effects by acting as a moderator in the relation between organisational and technological IS architecture complexity. Thus, organisations without adequate EAM are likely to face large increases in technological complexity due to increasing organisational complexity, whereas organisations with adequate EAM exhibit no such relation.
    Scopus© Citations 7
  • Publication
    Strategic alignment of enterprise architecture management – how portfolios of control mechanisms track a decade of enterprise transformation at Commerzbank
    Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is commonly employed by large organizations to coordinate local information system development efforts in line with organization-wide strategic objectives while simultaneously avoiding redundancies and inconsistencies. Even though EAM tools and processes have become increasingly mature over the past decade, many organizations still struggle to generate impact from their EAM initiatives. To this end, we describe how enterprise architects at Commerzbank, a major international bank, employed a control mechanism portfolio perspective to more effectively anchor EAM within the organization. This approach allows to purposefully combine a wide range of different formal and informal EAM control mechanisms, thereby going beyond the formal, topdown driven mechanisms predominantly discussed in EAM literature. Furthermore, such EAM control mechanism portfolios provide an effective means to purposefully realign EAM in reaction to major strategic shifts. The application of this perspective is demonstrated by tracing the evolution of EAM at Commerzbank for more than a decade (2008 to 2018) through a turbulent and challenging competitive environment, resulting in several major strategic realignments that required corresponding adjustments in EAM. We believe that such consciously designed and diversified EAM control mechanism portfolios also provide a useful means for other large organizations to more effectively conduct EAM.
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    Scopus© Citations 8
  • Publication
    Dynamic Capabilities for Transitioning from Product Platform Ecosystem to Innovation Platform Ecosystem
    (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) ; ; ; ;
    Tilson, David
    Over recent decades, many platform-native start-ups and firms were founded and some are now among the world’s most valuable. This study, however, focuses on an incumbent firm transitioning from a long established product platform ecosystem to an innovation platform ecosystem in response to the platform-natives’ threats of disruption. We specifically investigate the dynamic capabilities needed by the incumbent firm in an enterprise software ecosystem in the transition phase. Our analysis builds on multi-perspective empirical data covering the viewpoints of all the actor types in the ecosystem, i.e., plat-form owner, platform partners, and end-user firms. The results imply the necessity of four dynamic capabilities: resource curation, ecosystem preservation, resource reconfiguration, and ecosystem diversification. With this study, we contribute to the emerging literature on the incumbent firms’ transition to a new ecosystem organising logic, and extend the study of dynamic capabilities specifically for the case of transitioning to innovation platform ecosystems.
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    Scopus© Citations 11
  • Publication
    Digital nudging for technical debt management at Credit Suisse
    (Taylor & Francis, 2022-07-21) ; ;
    Buchmann, Lorena
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    Schneider, Alexander W.
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    Scopus© Citations 5
  • Publication
    Governance Mechanisms in Digital Platform Ecosystems: Addressing the Generativity-Control Tension
    Digital platform owners repeatedly face paradoxical design decisions with regard to their platforms’ generativity and control, requiring them to facilitate co-innovation whilst simultaneously retaining control over third-party complementors. To address this challenge, platform owners deploy a variety of governance mechanisms. However, researchers and practitioners currently lack a coherent understanding of what major governance mechanisms platform owners rely on to simultaneously foster generativity and control. Conducting a structured literature review, we connect the fragmented academic discourse on governance mechanisms with each aspect of the generativity-control tension. Next to providing avenues for prospective digital platform research, we elaborate on the double-sidedness of governance mechanisms in fostering both generativity and control.
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  • Publication
    The Mechanics of Enterprise Architecture Principles
    (Assoc. of Information Systems, 2021-09-05) ;
    Legner, Christine
    Inspired by the city planning metaphor, enterprise architecture (EA) has gained considerable attention from academia and industry for systematically planning an IT landscape. Since EA is a relatively young discipline, a great deal of its work focuses on architecture representations (descriptive EA) that conceptualize the different architecture layers, their components, and relationships. Beyond architecture representations, EA should comprise principles that guide architecture design and evolution toward predefined value and outcomes (prescriptive EA). However, research on EA principles is still very limited. Notwithstanding the increasing consensus regarding the role and definition of EA principles, the limited publications neither discuss what can be considered suitable principles nor explain how they can be turned into effective means to achieve expected EA outcomes. This study seeks to strengthen the extant theoretical core of EA by investigating EA principles through a mixed methods research design comprising a literature review, an expert study, and three case studies. The first contribution of this study is that it sheds light on the ambiguous interpretation of EA principles in the extant research by ontologically distinguishing between principles and nonprinciples, as well as deriving a set of suitable EA (meta)principles. The second contribution connects the nascent academic discourse on EA principles to studies on EA value and outcomes. This study conceptualizes the “mechanics” of EA principles as a value creation process, where EA principles shape architecture design and guide its evolution and thereby realize EA outcomes. Consequently, this study brings the underserved, prescriptive aspect of EA to the fore and helps enrich its theoretical foundations.
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    Scopus© Citations 20
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  • Publication
    The Evolution of Information Systems Architecture: An Agent-Based Simulation Model
    (Management Information Research Center; University of Minnesota, 2020-03) ; ; ;
    Understanding how information systems (IS) architecture evolves and what outcomes can be expected from the evolution of IS architecture presents a considerable challenge for both research and practice. The evolution of IS architecture is marked by management’s efforts to keep local and short-term IS investments in line with enterprise-wide and long-term objectives, so they often employ coercive mechanisms to enforce enterprise-wide considerations on local actors. However, an organization is shaped by a multitude of heterogeneous local actors’ actions that pursue their own, sometimes conflicting, goals, norms, and values. This study offers a theory-informed simulation model that explores how IS architecture evolves and with what outcomes in various types of organizations. The simulation model is informed by institutional theory to capture various types of organizations that are characterized by different combinations of coercive, normative, and mimetic pressures, and by complex adaptive systems theory to capture the emergent character of IS architecture’s evolution. First, we outline the insights from simulation experiments. Then, building on the simulation model and theoretical insights, we discuss implications for both research and practice.
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    Scopus© Citations 60
  • Publication
    Simulation-Based Research in Information Systems: Epistemic Implications and a Review of the Status Quo
    Simulations provide a useful methodological approach for studying the behavior of complex socio-technical information systems (IS), in which humans and IT artifacts interact to process information. However, the use of simulations is relatively new in IS research and the current presence and impact of simulation-based studies is still limited. Furthermore, simulation-based research is quite different from other approaches, making it difficult to position and evaluate it adequately. Therefore, this paper first analyses the epistemic particularities of simulation-based IS research. Based on this analysis, a structured literature review of the status quo of simulation-based IS research was conducted, to understand how IS scholars currently employ simulation. A comparison of the epistemic particularities of simulation-based research with its status quo in IS literature allows to critically examine epistemic inferences in the respective research process. The results provide guidance for prospective simulation-based IS research through discussing the theory-based derivation of simulation models, as well as different simulation techniques, validation techniques, and simulation uses.
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    Scopus© Citations 39