26th International Association for Management of Technology Conference - IAMOT 2017

This paper provides a novel approach for agile Digital Transformation of Enterprise Architecture Models in engineering collaboration in the automotive industry. Emergent behavior is behavior of a system that does not depend on its individual parts, but on their relationships to one another. Such behavior exists in biological systems, physical systems as well as in the human performance. It is an inherited nature of a System-of-Systems (SoS). A suitable framework is needed to guide the development of SoS architecture, which includes emergent behavior. Enterprise architecture (EA) is a discipline driving change within organizations. Aligning and integrating business and IT thereby belongs to strategic management. The management of EA change is a challenging task for enterprise architects, due to complex dependencies amongst EA models, when evolving towards different alternatives. In this paper, various architecture frameworks are explored for an application on SoS architecture: the Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) and Ministry of Defense Architecture Framework (MODAF) are declared inappropriate. The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF) and the Zachman Framework on the other hand are suitable. The use of Zachman Framework to guide the architecture development is described in step-by-step details in this paper. The agent-based simulation is recommended to develop the SoS architectural models following the Zachman Framework guidance. Zachman framework has gained a high importance in large companies. Question arises how it can be applied to SME, in particular with the collaborative engineering. As two concurrently emerging topics, the enterprise architecture (EA) and the digital transformation (DT) affect each other. Within SME, the adoption of enterprise architecture heavily depends on the position of the business owners and business leaders respectively. In the most cases, they are satisfied with an optimized workflow management. Process definitions according to TOGAF are on a very abstract level and provide solely an informal guidance that can be used as a starting point for further refinement in organizations. As a matter of fact, a SME is acting agile and flexible, and don’t accept formalism easily. OpenDESC.com is an industry-focused portal for engineering collaboration with features serving especially automotive throughout an extended enterprise. It is a holistic service, which includes both translation of engineering data into a custom environment and secured provision of engineering data to partners in an automotive SoS. The conception consists of a high-level architecture of the platform on the perspective of 6 selected layers of the Zachman Framework. We have investigated the emergent behavior of this architecture which is expected to be easy to adapt and transform for development of new services. The findings and results of this research have a significant relevance to implementation of Digital Transformation in the complex global operations. It is contribution to coherence of Enterprise Architecture and agile Digital Transformation in development of new solutions and services. With this paper we will contribute to the conference topic “Product and service development” and give our answer to the question “How can new business models enhance the success of SMEs and large enterprises in a digital world?”