Adaptive Enterprise Architecture: Towards a model

Abstract

Nowadays, enterprises are facing many changes due to digital transformation. So, they have to deal with new requirements that impact various parts of their Enterprise Architecture. To address the needs created by this new digital era, agility and adaptation are compulsory. Though Enterprise Architecture (EA) was designed as a catalyst for change management, traditional Enterprise Architecture approaches do not rely on well-defined concepts, lack agility and are constrained by layered architecture (business layer, functional layer, deployment layer, etc.). Thus, a new generation of EA, allowing continuous self-improvement and proactive adaptation to better match the new conditions, is required. In this paper, we highlighted some criteria, regarding the adaptation of EA and exploited them to show the limitations of the EA approaches analyzed. Then, we presented agile methods principles and discussed the mapping between them and the criteria that we proposed before. Finally, we proposed a simplified model based on Scrum for adaptive enterprise architecture.