Quality Enhancement in Creating Enterprise Architecture: Relevance of Academic Models in Practice

This chapter presents an explicit approach, that is both theory and practice driven, to support evaluation and collaboration activities when creating enterprise architecture. The approach will be applicable in addressing evaluation and collaboration related aspects in two primary phases of the Architecture Development Method (ADM) of The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). The phases of interest are preliminary phase (defining architecture principles) and phase A (creating architecture vision). These two phases involve activities where evaluation of alternatives and collaboration among key stakeholders and enterprise architects, are paramount. Based on theoretical insights, a collaboration process to facilitate the steps in the formulated approach has been developed. Both the approach and the process design for its realisation, have been evaluated by exposing them to practitioners. This was done using structured walkthoughs. Insights from these walkthrough sessions with experienced enterprise architects, were used to enrich the theoretical models. Generally this chapter aims at demonstrating how theoretical models, enriched with experiences from industry, can fill the currently existing lack of profound analysis of success factors for enterprise architecting. Note that this lack exists in both academia and industry.