Generally, IT‑supported business solutions are
developed according to the specific requirements of an
organization's units and thereby focus, for example, on
specific function(s), product group(s), market(s), or
geography/ies. Following the latter approach for a long period of
time results in significant redundancies and / or inconsistencies,
which in turn endanger the efficiency of the business processes and
their underlying IT applications as well as their flexibility in
dealing with ever-changing environmental conditions. In addressing
this challenge, several approaches are brought to the fore such as
IT architecture that only considers the IT components, business
architecture that only concerns the business components, or data
architecture that only interest in the data aspect. To account for
a multi-aspect and comprehensive perspective, Enterprise
Architecture Management (EAM) has been established as a management
subdiscipline that covers the entirety of an organization's
IT‑supported business solutions (from all units of an
organization) over their entire life cycle. EAM aims to
systematically control the complexity of the whole system (i.e.,
the entirety of an organization's IT‑supported business
solutions), to eliminate inconsistencies among the system's
individual constituents and to leverage synergies among them. In
addition, EAM puts business innovation initiatives into a holistic
perspective and integrates them appropriately into the system as a
whole. In particular, for large‑scale innovation or
transformation initiatives such as Digital Transformation, EAM is
of utmost importance to ensure that digital transformation
activities are systematically executed, dependencies are considered
and ʺthe whole is more than the sum of its
partsʺ.
The course is closely informed by recent research discourses as
well as by current case examples from practice.
In particular, the course will cover the following topics:
EAM basic concepts and necessity
EAM benefits and use
Architecture complexity, transparency and simplification EAM
processes, principles, planning and control
EAM implementation: architecture models and meta models
EAM's tools for architecture modeling and analysis
EAM evolution: EAM maturity, current EAM developments in
research and practice