Towards an understanding of business design within enterprise architecture management: a cautionary tale

Business Design represents a set of concepts that are described in the literature as providing a sound foundation for sustainable competitive advantage into the future. The particular values underpinning Business design are based on the enablement of a design thinking approach to solving the imponderable problems that organisations regularly encounter. In particular, the application of a design thinking approach to Business Design requires that resultant system designs are economically viable and technologically feasible. Enterprise Architecture Management plays a vital role in supporting these latter two requirements. Yet the definition of Enterprise Architecture Management as the 'normative restriction of design freedom' (Deitz, 2011) implies constraints that could impose limits on such business design. Consequently, the qualitative inductive research described in this document was undertaken to explore the perceived paradoxical relationship between Business Design and Enterprise Architecture Management. This dissertation recounts the process and results of this research initiative based on data recorded during interviews with a number of management level staff at a leading South African Insurance organisation. The participants were intimately involved in a programme to, amongst other objectives, establish a platform to support enterprise-wide Business Design within Enterprise Architecture Management, a programme that was experiencing a number of challenges and that was still underway at the time of completion of this research. Findings arising from this research were that the varying perceptions and levels of commitment of business and IT stakeholders associated with the programme and its requirements, contributed significantly to these challenges. In addition to providing a rich description of the case organisation's journey towards the establishment of a Business Design platform, a sensitising framework – 'The 6 Cs Framework in Support of the Successful Enablement of Business Design within Enterprise Architecture Management' – is proposed as a useful tool to assist organisations that might be considering a similar programme in the future.

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Department of Information Systems

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Lavin, Shirley

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/8506

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/8506