Enterprise architecture

Enterprise architecture (EA) deals with the texts, models and rules of the complete information infrastructure of an enterprise.
This course is intended for master students in Information Science, i.e. Business Informatics (for which the course is mandatory) and Content and Knowledge Engineering; and also for masters in Informatics. The course focuses on the modeling of enterprise architectures and enterprise functions. It also gives an overview of the underlying scientific theories regarding a number of architectural themes, such as different types of architectures, architectural frameworks, governance, rationalization of the product portfolio etc. Since the content of this course is obviously influenced to a great extent by developments in the IT-market, we will pay a great deal of attention to this aspect by letting the students work on practical real-world cases from industry, (semi-) governmental organizations, large IT-companies and so on (see course form below).

Here we just mention the following two books as they provide general background:

• Lankhorst, M. (2005). Enterprise Architecture at Work: Modelling, Communication and Analysis. Berlin, Heidelberg, Germany: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-540-24371-7.
• Wagter, R., van den Berg, M., Luijpers, J., & van Steenbergen, M. (2005). Dynamic Enterprise Architecture: How to Make it Work. Hoboken, New Jersey, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 0-471-68272-1.

To give some feeling for the broad range of topics, we refer to the topic section mentioned in Trends in Enterprise Architecture Research (TEAR; see http://www.telin.nl/index.cfm?language=en&id=1182&context=1111 or http://tear.iwi.unisg.ch/fileadmin/tear/CfP-TEAR-Workshop-2009.pdf). See also http://www.via-nova-architectura.org/tear-2007/index.php for a number of articles related to these topics. Of course, there are many more.

Because of the reasons just mentioned we will provide our own reader and selected materials from the literature. The reader contains an introduction to Enterprise Architecture Modeling (EAM) and several example papers produced by students of former EIA courses. Both the reader, the selected materials from the literature and the sheets from the lectures will be made available online.

The course consists of lectures and practical work. The lectures will focus first on modeling aspects and then turn to a number of general topics in Enterprise Architecture. Also, students have to give presentations about their practical work (see below).

For the practical work, students need to form teams of two or three persons. Each team is responsible for finding a company for which they must write a paper containing architecture models (examples of these models can be found in last year's reader available from http://www.cs.uu.nl/docs/vakken/ear/). Besides this paper, each team has to write a paper on an architectural theme (e.g. Business IT Alignment, Service Orientation, Governance). For questions related to the practical work you can make an appointment during the weekly question hour.

It is our aim to combine a number of the elaborations made by the students in a book. This poses some extra conditions on the elaborations, e.g. a consistent lay-out. To this end we will provide two simple template files, one for text and one for diagrams.

• Students will have to produce two papers as mentioned above in the description of the Course form and since the students are working in groups, it should be made clear in the papers who is responsible for which part. The first version for each topic is a draft version. It will be assessed and must be sufficient (if it's not, it must be improved during the course until it is assessed as sufficient).
• Besides the draft versions students must produce a final version for both topics. These final versions will both count for 30% in the overall grade for the course.
• The presentations of the students will count for 10% in the overall grade.
• There will be one written exam at the end of the course on specified parts of the literature, counting for 30% in the overall grade. But the grade for the exam must be at least 5. If it isn't, the overall grade will be the minimum of 5 and the weighted average of the four exam parts mentioned above.