Service oriented Enterprise Architecture for Enterprise Engineering
Selmin Nurcan, Panthéon Sorbonne, Rainer Schmidt · 2011
There is a more and more common understanding, that not the ownership of IT resources but their management is the foundation for sustainable competitive advantage [1]. According to [2], smart companies define how they (will) do business (using an operating model) and design the processes and infrastructure critical to their current and future operations (using an enterprise architecture). Leading enterprises in the U.S. derive more than 50% of their revenues from services [3]. Through services, enterprises stabilize their revenues [4]. This applies not only to pure services such as transportation but also for material products that are augmented by services such as maintenance, consulting and training. By exchanging services within partnerships, enterprises are able to combine their competences and thus provide solutions to the customer not possible for the single enterprise. The management of information technology resources should be done with the application of engineering principles, called enterprise engineering. Enterprise engineering is the application of engineering principles to the design, restructuring and operation of enterprises and their cooperation with other enterprises. It allows deriving the Enterprise Architecture from the enterprise goals and strategy and aligning it with the enterprise resources; in turn Enterprise Architecture, if it is documented, may facilitate enterprise engineering. Enterprise architecture [2], [5] aims (i) to understand the interactions and all kind of articulations between business and information technology, (ii) to define how to align business components and IT components, as well as business strategy and IT strategy, and more particularly (iii) to develop and support a common understanding and sharing of those purposes of interest. Enterprise architecture is used to map the enterprise goal and strategy to the enterprise’s resources (actors, assets, IT supports) and to take into account the evolution of this mapping. It also provides documentation on the assignment of enterprise resources to the enterprise goals and strategy. To this end, advantageous patterns (best practices) can be reused and alternative design solutions can be compared. Furthermore, enterprise architecture may be checked for compliance with laws, regulatory rules etc. Finally, enterprise architecture facilitates the measurement the performance and efficiency of the resources used. There are different paradigms for developing enterprise architecture. The most important regarding the purpose of this workshop is to encapsulate the functionalities provided by IT supported resources as services. By this means, it is possible to clearly describe the contributions of those resources both in terms of functionality and quality and to define a service oriented enterprise architecture. Furthermore, service-oriented enterprise architecture easily integrates widespread technological approaches such as SOA or emerging ones as the cloud computing because they also use service as structuring paradigm. Serviceoriented enterprise engineering further develops the enterprise engineering approach selecting service as governing paradigm. The enterprise goals and strategies are also mapped to a service oriented enterprise architecture. By exchanging services within partnerships, enterprises are able to combine their competences and thus provide solutions to the customer not possible for the single enterprise. Service-oriented enterprise architecture differentiates four layers of services: Business, Software, Platform and Infrastructure. Thus, its scope is much broader than the scope of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) and also includes services not accessible through software such as business and infrastructure services. Services of different layers may be interconnected in service (value) nets to provide higher-level services.