Author:
Philip Huysmans
Affiliation:
University of Antwerp, Belgium
Keyword(s):
Enterprise Architectures, Business Innovation and Software Evolution, Business-IT Alignment and Traceability.
Abstract:
In volatile and customer-driven markets, the ability to innovate is a key success factor. Innovations have to be implemented at a steady pace to ensure business sustainability. However, the innovation process is only poorly understood. Therefore, many organizations and governments have difficulties stimulating and managing innovation. Several authors have proposed organizational modularity as a theoretical basis to understand and manage innovation. Their main argument is that a modular structure enables parallel evolution of different organizational modules. Consequently, innovations can be implemented without being limited by implementation aspects of other organizational modules. Modularity has been applied by various authors on different levels of the organization, such as products, processes, departments, and supporting IT systems. Moreover, enterprise architecture frameworks allow the modeling of different viewpoints of an organization. However, few organizations can be consider
ed to have completely decoupled organizational layers. Consequently, dependencies between organizational modules on different enterprise architecture layers can heavily impact the ability to introduce innovations. In this paper, we demonstrate how modular dependencies impact enterprise architecture projects in two case studies. We then present a case study to illustrate how a modular dependency approach can be used to complement existing modeling approaches.
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