What is it about?
Organisations constantly need to change because of new laws, services, customer needs, technologies, and business goals. This work presents a practical way to check whether an organisation’s enterprise architecture — the way its business processes, data, applications, and technology fit together — can cope with such changes. The method asks stakeholders to describe likely future changes as simple scenarios, rank the most important ones, and then analyse which parts of the architecture would need to change. This helps reveal which architecture option is easier to adapt, where extra effort may be needed, and which areas could become complex before costly implementation begins.
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Why is it important?
Enterprise architecture decisions are expensive and difficult to reverse. If an organisation chooses an architecture that cannot adapt easily, later changes may require more time, money, and effort than expected. This work is important because it gives organisations a structured way to evaluate change-readiness before implementation, not after problems appear. By using likely future change scenarios, stakeholders can see which architecture option is more flexible, which parts may become complex, and where design improvements are needed. This can reduce the risk of costly architectural mistakes and support better long-term planning.
Perspectives
This publication represents an important step in my research journey because it connects two worlds: established software architecture evaluation methods and the broader, more complex reality of enterprise architecture. At the core of this work is a practical question: how can organisations avoid choosing architectures that look good on paper, but become difficult to change later? The method shows how change scenarios can make architecture discussions more concrete for both technical and business stakeholders. It also supports my ongoing research into more systematic and practical ways of evaluating enterprise architecture in real organisations.
Norbert Rudolf Busch
Warsaw University of Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Enterprise Architecture Modifiability Analysis, August 2017, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-65208-5_9.
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