Architecting the Enterprise along Communication Paradigm Using the TOGAF^® Framework

Abstract

The hidden paradigm behind modelling the enterprise capabilities is based on Ford’s and Taylor’s idea of sequencing activities and taking the best in class approaches. It has once proven to be suitable for mass production of goods. While the paradigm is still the basic modelling assumption for shaping enterprise capabilities, the environmental and social basis for enterprises have changed. The business has moved from mass good production to massive individualized services around goods, where customers can place unpredicted change requests almost at any time. The fact that such events occur unpredicted does not mean they occur rarely. The exception to the lucky path is basically the routine. How the reaction to such unpredicted events look like is shown by the inflationary usage of e-mails, instant messages, phones, and meetings. It seems that communication is about to become the new paradigm. Putting massively personalized services on top of complex products asks for fitting architectural structures. Ford’s hidden paradigm fails to master the resulting architectural complexity due to the lack of the concept of “communication”. What enterprises need to master is an enterprise architecture driven by communication. The proposed paper discusses a methodology to create an enterprise architecture that promotes the communication-centric paradigm using the TOGAF framework. We describe how the role of individuals within an enterprise and the communication paths between them are used to create an enterprise architecture that is easily understood and accepted by end-users. We also show how architecture planning on business, application, and data is performed using the concepts of subject-oriented business process management (S-BPM) in rapid architecture cycles, creating greater agility.