Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The operations have been formalized. Further details of the formalization are avail-
able elsewhere (Martin et al. 2011).
5 Application
This section demonstrates their application to a case (adapted from Sessions 2007).
The case describes an organization, MedAMore, that owns a regional chain of drug-
stores with a software package, MedAManage, consisting of three modules: M/Store,
to run at the drug store; M/Warehouse, to run in a regional warehouse; and M/Home,
to run at the home office. As the result of acquiring three regional chains, the software
package has become an obstacle. M/Store now requires specializations such as re-
gional insurance plans; M/Warehouse must reflect practices at regional warehouses;
and the information-sharing approach cannot scale to the now 200 drugstores and
regional offices. Upgrading is difficult because each module is large. The technical
problems have created internal conflicts. The business side wants to acquire two more
chains while IT was struggling to bring existing acquisitions online. EA is now being
considered as a possible mechanism to build stronger partnerships across IT and busi-
ness groups. Table 4 illustrates the operations on EA models that can help achieve
these potentially stronger partnerships with the above case description.
Table 4. Illustrating operations with MedAMore
Operation
Described in the MedAMore Case
Projection
Making intended consequences of IT investment decisions visible to the
business stakeholders; making financial implications of IT investments
visible to the Finance function.
Instantiation
Constructing instances of elements in the framework, e.g. creating
instances such as activity and object; and instantiating these, e.g. creating
instances of Activity such as 'Data cleansing for pharmacy orders.'
Refinement
Elaboration and Decomposition by adding new attributes to track the
impact of IT investment decisions: investigation of financial impact and
impact on IT infrastructure.
Specialization
Generating regional or store-specific specialization for practices and
modules. Distinguishing these based on criteria such as insurance plans
or region resulting in changes to modules and reporting structure.
Derivation
Transforming models specified by stakeholders into detailed
requirements. Deriving information from these models about the impacts
of IT investments for affects on different portions of the IT infrastructure.
Linking
Linking operational views of business processes to design decisions, to
organizational structure decisions, and IT investment decisions. Links
traversed to understand impact of IT investments on business operations.
The example demonstrates how the operations can help understand design and use
of EA models. We acknowledge that this does not constitute validation. We use the
example as a demonstration, similar to the suggestion by Hevner et al (2004).
Search WWH ::




Custom Search