Am 4.12.2020 hat Felix Timm, Doktorand am Lehrstuhl Wirtschaftsinformatik, erfolgreich seine Doktorarbeit verteidigt. Das Thema der Arbeit war “A Method for Developing Reference Enterprise Architectures”. Gutachter waren Prof. Kurt Sandkuhl und Prof. Peter Fettke (Universität des Saarlandes), die die Arbeit gemeinsam betreut haben. Das Ergebnis der Verteidigung war die Empfehlung an die Universität, den Doktorgrad „Dr.-Ing.“ zu verleihen, da die Arbeit als exzellent eingeschätzt wurde.
Das Foto zeigt Felix Timm mit Prof. Kurt Sandkuhl nach der Verteidigung.
Abstract:
In the age of globalization and digitization, organizations face rapid environmental changes, such as short technology lifecycles, digital disruption, or increasing regulatory pressure. These developments affect whole industries and demand organizational flexibility. Enterprises have to adapt their strategies, business models, and use information systems effectively in order to stay competitive. In many cases, these requirements address groups of various enterprises in a particular domain. However, they often lack the knowledge and resources to holistically adapt their business and IT structures, which paralyzes their organizational development and leads to isolated solutions.
From the perspective of information systems research, enterprise architecture management (EAM) is a widely-accepted discipline that helps enterprises to understand their organizational structures from a business and IT alignment perspective and support their organizational change processes. Furthermore, the reference modeling (RM) discipline provides methods to develop reusable IT-based reference mo- dels for a group of stakeholders. Reference models help organizations to identify desired future states in a particular problem context. In this regard, research acknowledges the potential of Reference Enter- prise Architectures (REA) to support organizations overcoming the challenges of industrial change. However, academic efforts dedicated to the methodological support of constructing REAs are scarce as research focuses on reference process models or software architectures.
This thesis applies the design science research paradigm and proposes REAM—a method for deve- loping REAs. After investigating the local practices of the utility industry and the financial services domain, the author derives the practical problem that industries characterized by change lack holistic approaches such as REAs for organizational transformation. A thorough knowledge base analysis further reveals an absence of method support for developing REAs. REAM aims to close this research gap. In an iterative search process, the thesis shows REAM’s utility. In the end, REAM’s design evolved over seven evaluation episodes that primarily assessed REAM’s fit to prior formulated requirements in naturalistic settings and collected feedback from practical and scholar audiences.
REAM represents this thesis‘ main contribution to the scientific body of knowledge. Besides, the thesis provides an improved comprehension of the REA concept. Further, the application of REAM produced two domain-specific REAs that have been validated and used in the utility industry and the financial services domain.