Supplementing Enterprise Architecture Approaches with Support for Executing Collaborative Tasks — A Case of TOGAF ADM

Abstract

Effective execution of collaborative tasks during enterprise architecture creation helps to increase stakeholders’ involvement and awareness in the architecture effort. However, enterprise architecture approaches lack detailed support for collaborative tasks. In an effort to address this, an exploratory survey was conducted among enterprise architects to investigate issues associated with executing collaborative tasks during enterprise architecture creation. Accordingly, this paper discusses mainly three aspects. First, it discusses how issues that were reported in the survey can be addressed by adopting the design science research methodology to guide the development of a process or method that supports the execution of collaborative tasks in architecture creation. The developed process is principally rooted in collaboration engineering and soft systems methodology (SSM). Second, the paper discusses how the developed method can be used to supplement enterprise architecture approaches that are used in practice (e.g. TOGAF) with support for executing collaborative tasks. Third, the paper discusses key findings from evaluating the developed process in two real organizations.