Using Architectural Principles to make the IT-Strategy come true : focusing on the electric power ndustry

Abstract: Most large enterprises are facing numerous challenges concerning their information systems, IS, and information and communication technology, ICT. Today, many enterprises employ a considerable number of applications that often have redundant functionality. There is also a large diversification in the ICT products and technologies employed. Further, integration costs are a major issue in almost all acquisition projects and many enterprises experience a lack of data quality and information security. The list of IS/ICT management challenges can be made much longer. At most enterprises, IS/ICT decisions are made by autonomous business units. In order to change the situation described above and build a more cost-effective IS/ICT environment, all business units need to make consistent IS/ICT decisions. Distributed and consistent decisions can only be made if the decision maker knows which decisions to make and why he/she needs to make them. The latter can be described by the target architecture for the whole enterprise IS/ICT, the information needed to conduct the business and its relationship to the business processes and business organization together with the benefits that the target architecture provides to the business. Which decisions to make are formulated into architectural principles, i.e. rules that express how your enterprise needs to design and deploy IS/ICT. The present thesis is a composite thesis including eight papers. The first four papers describe the reference model for IS/ICT management responsibilities that is one of the outcomes of the present research. Two different surveys have been performed in order to find out what the major IS/ICT management challenges are. The first survey was answered by 62 Swedish Chief Information Officers, CIOs, from large private enterprises as well as municipalities. The second survey was answered by twelve CIO’s from the European electric power industry. In the fifth paper, one of the IS/ICT management responsibilities, i.e. data quality, is used to illustrate how the IS/ICT manager’s responsibilities can be decomposed into measurable units. Over 70 respondents were used in order to perform an enterprise- wide measurement of the data quality at a Swedish insurance company. The last three papers are devoted to architectural principles. Architectural principles are introduced and guidelines on how to define and manage them are proposed in the sixth paper. The guidelines have been used in a review of Vattenfall’s architectural principles. In the last two papers, architectural principles and the reference model are combined in a methodology for assessing the enterprise architecture. The methodology has been used in two different case studies, one at Vattenfall and one at Scania. In both case studies multiple information systems were assessed from many different viewpoints resulting in that many respondents were interviewed.