Christophe Ponsard, Annick Majchrowski, Driving the Adoption of Enterprise Architecture Inside Small Companies, 17th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS), Barcelona (Spain), 27-30 April 2015 (accepted).
Including Enterprise Architecture (EA) as part of an organisation’s processes is an important milestone in reaching higher maturity levels because it will drive the a long term alignment of IT and business dimensions.
This paper explores some important questions related to the introduction of EA inside very small enterprises or entities (VSE), referring to the very common situation where the IT department has limited resources even possibly in a larger organisation. We provide a number of elements of answers on how EA can successfully be deployed in VSE based on a study of approaches already developed by others complemented by our extensive experience in helping such kind of companies to improve their IT practices and adopt EA. The paper is illustrated on a multi-year case study. It has also a special focus on the ISO29110 standard directed towards VSE and possible ways to evolve it to take EA into account in more advanced maturity profiles under preparation.