Handbook on Enterprise Architecture

With the globalisation of economies enterprises are operating as large, complex networks of autonomous units. Design offices, manufacturing facilities, services and maintenance stations are scattered around the world. Component supplier networks provide vital subassemblies and parts. Such intricate field of endeavour needs a clear operational structure in order to design and manage the continuous metamorphosis necessary not just to keep businesses alive, but also to strive for growing businesses and operate them successfully during their whole of life.

This chapter presents GERAM, which is the result of a ten year project by the IFIP-IFAC Task Force generalising the contributions of a number of Enterprise Architecture Frameworks. As a generalisation, GERAM allows different Frameworks to be assessed for completeness, as well as be further developed. The GERAM Framework includes a number of useful concepts in Enterprise Architecture which were earlier not precisely defined and this lack of definition prevented practitioners and researchers to exchange their results. GERAM is the basis of several international standards, most notably ISO 15704:2000 and ISO/DIS 19439. In addition, GERAM can also be used as an Enterprise Architecture Framework itself.

This Chapter presents the mapping of selected type 2 (life cycle) enterprise architectures and architecture frameworks onto the Generalised Enterprise Reference Architecture and Methodology (GERAM) framework. It covers aspects regarding the reference architectures (including life cycle / life history concepts and modelling frameworks) and associated modelling methodologies, languages and reference models where applicable. The Chapter builds on previous mapping efforts of established frameworks, giving a refined interpretation of those results. In addition, several emerging frameworks are also reviewed and mapped against the GERAM.

This Chapter presents an introvert perspective of strategy formation, through the presentation of the resource-based view (RBV) concept. It contains a review of a) relevant fundamentals of the strategic management field (the definition of strategy, resources and capabilities), and b) a strategy framework, which incorporates the conceptual knowledge of the RBV intertwined with some well-known tools in the domain of application.

This Chapter is significantly different in style from the others, and with good reason. First, this text is reprint of a chapter written by the author² as part of a book on communication. Second, it is about human relationships that so much influence the success or failure of management’s effort to carry out change.

The notion of enterprise integration revolves around the central idea of enterprise modelling. Enterprises can be ’integrated’ at the level of basic services, at the level of pplications or at the level of models. Market forces drive to the second of these, because a robust market exists for applications (and related tools); application integration frameworks are therefore well supported by the marketplace. At the time of writing, two major camps of application frameworks are evolving:

Enterprises co-operate with other enterprises in all phases of product life cycle to achieve cost reduction, increase their operational flexibility, and allow them to focus on core competencies. The preferred method for co-operation can be anything from long term alliances between partners in fixed supply chains — to a goal oriented, project focused co-operation as it is usually done in virtual enterprises (VEs).

The audience for this Chapter ranges from the CEO to the technical specialist (in-house or consultant), i.e. stakeholders who will be major players in the change methodology and are identified by their role in the change process. This Chapter is placing much emphasis on various types of preliminary analysis deemed necessary to support enterprise change processes. Many of these processes are strategic in nature and thus there is a need for ’strategic input’ on behalf of management with leadership abilities (refer to Chapter 5). Often, the various strategic alternatives need to be analysed to establish which one is realistically attainable organisationally, technically and financially. The analytic processes described herein are not a replacement for strategy making but are indispensable for supporting strategy making, so as to ensure that the developed strategy is feasible.

Nowadays, it is becoming more and more important to conceptualise businesses that are competitive to face the trends that are leading to increased levels of complexity, dynamism, and to uncertainty of the global environment. Traditional ways of designing businesses are more suited to evolutionary change, therefore the definition (or re-definition) of a business should take into account novel approaches from the start, i.e. the conception of the new or changed business. A business is the integration of people, processes and technologies with the aim of fulfilling some mission (usually the provision of a service or the production of some goods for a market). People who have entrepreneurship, leadership and the ability to collaborate, create an environment of trust and commitment that implements the envisaged concept. Therefore, the development of an enterprise concept is based on humans aiming to achieve their vision for an enterprise. Only people can recognise the customer’s requirements, design products to satisfy them, and construct and run the factories that deliver those products. Only people can learn the lessons of experience and apply them in a manner that improves the future of a company (Miller and Berger, 2001). Hence, people play a key role in developing the enterprise concept; in fact, it is the people engaged in this activity who create enterprises. These enterprises will produce wealth for all stakeholders, people (customers, suppliers, employees, investors) and communities where

Enterprises can be very confusing. They can be better understood if we look at them as groups of objects (i.e. people, tools, materials, etc.), which interact with each another. If we find that this approach is somewhat realistic, modelling an enterprise using this approach becomes more feasible. There are several important aspects of enterprises which, if understood, help us understand the enterprises themselves. The following discussion will address these important aspects. Figure 10.1 summarizes this discussion¹.

One of the most important tasks in the requirements life-cycle phase is to determine the functions that the given enterprise entity must have and how these functions interact — i.e., through exchanging information and material. For this purpose, one has to determine what the user (business owner) would like to include in the specified entity. The result may be called the user requirements specification of functions and data. These requirements may be captured by analysing the business processes that the enterprise intends to implement. The task is usually performed by business analysts, who:

Once enterprise management has decided on a mission³ for the business and has determined the entities involved in satisfying the mission, it is necessary to define how these entities will be co-ordinated (managed) and controlled. Co-ordination and control is achieved using a system of ’management and control’ (also called a decisional structure, management and control system, or ’management, command and control’ in defence). This system must be able to work out all necessary actual commitments / controls based on actual objectives / feedbacks from the managed and controlled system as well as from the environment.

Enterprises can only be well managed if their business processes are clearly defined, well understood and precisely controlled. All of these requirements can be achieved by employing business process based enterprise models, which describe both process functionalities and their dynamic behaviour. The description of functionality has to include inputs and outputs, the means of transformation — such as resources, and their constraints — as well as other relevant information. A prime goal of enterprise modelling is to analyse and control business operations and therefore to improve the deployment of resources (Vernadat, 1996).

An enterprise model is a computational representation of the structure, activities, processes, information, people, behaviour, goals and constraints of a business, government or other enterprise. An enterprise model can be both descriptive and definitional and it may cover both ’what is’ and ’what should be’. The role of an enterprise model is to achieve model-driven enterprise design, analysis, control³ and evaluation. We will begin by considering these applications of enterprise modelling and the requirements that they impose on any formal approach to the representation and specification of enterprise models.

Design is one of the phases of the system life cycle of GERA (Generalised Enterprise Reference Architecture) which itself is a component of GERAM³. Design is split into two sub-phases: preliminary design ⁴ and detailed design. This section presents basic concepts and principles for preliminary design. The preliminary design of manufacturing systems will be used as a running example, however, the processes and rules presented here are equally valid for any kind of complex system.

This chapter is an introduction to organisational design; more authoritative texts exist that expand on the subject in detail. In this chapter, organisational design is treated as part of the enterprise architecting process. Organisational units are abstract entities with their own identity (some also being legal entities), and consist of people, resources and a set of responsibilities and allocated authority. Organisational units are created for two reasons: to shield the complexity of human relations and responsibilities that inevitably arise within a company, and to be able to temporarily disassociate oneself from the identity of individuals who are part of the organisational unit. This gives the organisational unit a certain level of stability — e.g. it is possible to refer to a given role in an organisational unit, instead of referring to the particular person filling in that role at the time. Some organisational units are created to exist for a longer period of time, such as a department or a committee, while some may be created for shorter periods, such as task forces, ad-hoc committees, project teams, etc.

Reference models are generic conceptual models that formalise recommended practices for a certain domain. Often labelled with the term ’best practice’, reference models claim to capture reusable efficient state-of-the-art practices. Thus, a more realistic label would be ’better practice’ or often even ’common practice’.

The Information Technology (IT) subsystem as a component and enabler of the business’ information system (IS), is a critical core element of the infrastructure of any modern enterprise. In fact, from the users’ perspective, the software side of the IT is represented by a large variety of tools, ranging from the generic office tools to specialized engineering, production planning, management decision support tools, or even large applications covering a wide spectrum of functions, such as the ERP systems. In order to guarantee the interoperation among these tools, or at least the necessary level of information exchange, a proper network infrastructure must also be in place. When the interoperation / integration among different IT components of the enterprise is ensured and their activities are coordinated, the IS, and implicitly IT subsystems play an essential, supporting role in the company’s performance and efficiency.

This Chapter is based on a document¹ prepared for the Office of the Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Acquisition and Technology) under the task order Defense Manufacturing Strategy and addresses a task objective, to provide a case study on integrated product/process development implementation. This case study will be used for acquisition and technology training purposes by the sponsor. Many of the incentives, strategies and implementation approaches at Ford have parallels in and implications for the acquisition processes of the Department of Defense (DoD). The DoD student is asked to draw conclusions based on his or her own situation.

Although research into business processes has been conducted earlier (e.g. IBM (Engelke et al., 1985) and CIMOSA (AMICE, 1989)), it was Hammer (1990) who first raised the visibility of business processes with the introduction of BPR — Business Process Re-engineering — in the early 90’s. In subsequent years, BPR has often been associated with drastic changes and downsizing initiatives, rather than improving practices and resulted in many failed reengineering megaprojects. The emergence of the Business Process Management (BPM) in the new millennium (post Y2K), has given renewed focus to the process promise and has been a quiet — yet solid — business revolution.

Farley Cutting Systems Australia (FCSA) is a CNC machine manufacturer in Australia. The company has customers all over the world and hence needs to provide effective and responsive remote support to customers in the use, maintenance and troubleshooting of their equipment. As the market for CNC machines expands, these needs will increase extensively in the next few years so that the current support processes will no longer be economically viable. In addition, the company desires to capture the extensive expert knowledge within and outside the company concerning their CNC machines, especially as it pertains to problem diagnosis. However, there is no ready means of gathering and storing this knowledge, and hence no way to exploit it for remote customer support.

This case study describes how the GERAM³ has been used to support the design, development and operations of SMEs⁴ in Mexico. The use of GERAM is described using the particular case study of a plastic products company. SMEs represent 99% of enterprises in developed countries and from 95% to 99% of enterprises in Latin American countries. Their contribution to the Gross Internal Product is an average of 51% in developed countries and an average of 43 % in Latin America (Emilio and Zevallos, 1999). Therefore, the development of SMEs is critical for the economic development of the countries, and this is particularly true for Latin America.