EH2780 IT Management with Enterprise Architecture II, Case Studies 12.0 credits

The course consists of a set of activities for you, as a student, to engage in. Assignments are divided into an introductory, a basic and an advanced assignment.

Introductory assignment

This part will support you in producing a Case study motivation report. Three topics will be discussed.

Enterprise Information Systems: To convince your case study contacts of the benefits of the study, it is important to first understand the basic structure and management of their enterprise information systems.

Enterprise Architecture: Since your recommendations to the company will be based on an enterprise architecture approach, you will need to have some background on this discipline.

Enterprise Architecture for decision-making: You will provide a recommendation for a decision that the case study organization can choose to implement. To convince the organization that your approach is suitable as decision-making support, you must be able to explain plainly how your use of enterprise architecture will lead to good recommendations.

Basic assignment

The goal of the basic assignment is to provide recommendations to the case study organization on future enterprise system evolution based on a ready-made metamodel (assessment framework).

Model the system: In order to predict system qualities, the proper information needs to be collected. Modeling languages are well suited to codify the required data. The goal of this step is to model the case study system. In order to accomplish the task, you need to understand the modeling language, establish contact with your designated case study organization, conduct interviews, collect and study system and business documents, and finally do the actual modeling.

Each student group is assigned a case study at the start of the course. Each group is also assigned an academic case study supervisor.

Model future candidate enterprise system scenarios: In order to recommend future developments of the system to the user organization, a set of future candidate enterprise system scenarios need to be proposed. These scenarios can either be proposed by people from the user organization or can be created by the student group.

Model the user organization’s requirements: To determine which scenario is the better, the user organization’s requirements need to be taken into account. Is Service A more important than Service B? Is Modifiability more important than Availability for Service A? What availability is minimally acceptable for Business process C? These and similar requirements can be captured using the provided metamodel.

Predict scenario quality: Prediction using the Enterprise Architecture Analysis Tool (EA2T) and the provided metamodel is really quite easy. Just press the “Calculate” button, wait, and see the results. A likely outcome is that the attempt to calculate reveals problems in the model. These must then be remedied. Perhaps it is possible for you, after the analysis, to modify one of the scenarios in a realistic way to increase its utility to the user organization. If you can, make sure to improve the scenarios in this manner.

Justify your recommendations: Your recommendation ought to be the candidate scenario that results in the highest utility score for the user organization. The user organization will, however, need to understand how you came to that conclusion. Therefore, you will need to motivate your recommendations to a layperson. Why is Scenario A better than B? Why did Scenario C have a lower modifiability than Scenario B? Why should we trust your estimation of the investment cost of Node X? Why is Y modeled as a service and not a function and how does that affect your prediction?

Advanced Assignment

In the bonus assignment, the metamodel provided by the course is no longer taken for granted. Instead, the main task is to improve on it in order to make recommendations more tailored to the case study company.

Augment the provided metamodel with a system quality of importance for the owner organization: The metamodel only contains analyses of a certain number of quality attributes including modifiability, availability, interoperability, cost, etc. However, the case study organization may also be interested in other quality attributes, such as security, performance, organizational efficiency, or perhaps business profitability. To prevent that your recommendations are limited by the scope of the provided metamodel, this task aims to extend it to include one other attribute.

Re-analyze, re-recommend and re-justify: After updating the metamodel with your own quality attribute prediction mechanism, the enterprise architecture scenarios at the case study organization need to be re-evaluated and your recommendations updated. This task is similar to the final three tasks of the basic assignment.

At the start of the course, students will form small groups of two to four persons. Each group will be assigned one or several information systems in operational use at some organization, such as an energy company, a product-developing company, or an insurance company. The main concrete result expected of the students is a set of recommendations regarding the future evolution of the information systems and their enterprise environment. The recommendations will be presented to the owner organization, which might choose to implement them.

In order to generate the system development recommendations, students are expected to employ the enterprise architecture methods and tools provided in the course. The goal of the course can be summarized in the following two learning objectives:

• What are the factors that affect various quality properties of information systems, and through what mechanisms do they act?

• How can enterprise architecture modeling and analysis be employed to predict the effects of changes to the factors on the qualities?

The involvement with a company has on many occasions resulted in master thesis projects and is a good introduction to the job market. Our previous students now typically work as management consultants at firms like Capgemini, Centigo and Accenture, as IT specialists at companies such as Ericsson, ABB, Vattenfall, IBM and Microsoft, or continue their studies as PhD students within Enterprise Architecture at Industrial Information and Control Systems.

Single course students: 120hp and English B or equivalent.

Recommended but not obligatory:

EH2010 Projektstyrning or EH2720/EH2760 Management of projects and EH2020 Industriella informations- och styrsystem or EH2770 IT-management med Enterprise Architecture I

No requirements, but a laptop can be of use.

The exact literature will be presented at the start of the course each year. Here you can find some of the previously used literature described.

Course book

For the course, we have authored the book IT Management with Enterprise Architecture. Currently, it is available as a pdf. We expect to release an iBook version later this year. You can read or download the pdf on the course homepage on KTH Social.

The Zachman article

In 1987, John Zachman wrote the article ”A framework for information systems architecture” in the IBM Systems Journal, thereby setting the enterprise architecture discipline on its course. The article is well written and surprisingly relevant today, a quarter of a decade later. It is available on the course page at KTH Social.

The EA2T software tool (the Enterprise Architecture Analysis Tool)

We hope you will employ the EA2T software tool extensively during the course. Developed at the department, it is capable of supporting enterprise architecture instance modeling, automatic prediction, and enterprise architecture class modeling. The EA2T is available for PC and Mac at http://www.ics.kth.se/eaat.

The Multi-Attribute Prediction (MAP) model

This is the ready-made, provided metamodel. Based on the ArchiMate metamodel, the Multi-Attribute Prediction (MAP) model is a UML class diagram to be used as a base for your modeling and prediction. It features capabilities to make predictions on the modifiability, availability, cost, interoperability, data accuracy, application usage and then to aggregate those quality attributes into a single utility score for a given scenario. The MAP is available at http://www.ics.kth.se/eaat.

The ArchiMate® 2.0 Specification

The ArchiMate metamodel is a well-established language for enterprise architecture, currently developed by The Open Group (http://www.opengroup.org). It constitutes the base for the MAP model. The latest specification is available for you on the course homepage in KTH Social.

The OMG Object Constraint Language (OCL) Specification, version 2.3.1

The causal relations in the MAP are specified in OCL. If you aim for the bonus assignment, this specification will be a good reference for you. It (in particular Section 7) is quite pedagogical about the OCL. The OCL specification is available for you at http://www.omg.org/spec/OCL/.

If the course is discontinued, students may request to be examined during the following two academic years.

• PRO1 - Project Plan, 2.0 credits, grading scale: P, F
• PRO2 - Investigation Plan, 3.0 credits, grading scale: A, B, C, D, E, FX, F
• PRO3 - Final Report, 5.0 credits, grading scale: A, B, C, D, E, FX, F
• SEM1 - Lecture Series, 2.0 credits, grading scale: P, F

Based on recommendation from KTH’s coordinator for disabilities, the examiner will decide how to adapt an examination for students with documented disability.

The examiner may apply another examination format when re-examining individual students.

In order for the course’s pedagogical stance to work, the examination must be well aligned with the learning goals. The grade will be based on reports written by you in order to convince the case study organization of your study’s results. The first report is written early and aims to convince the case study organization of the benefits of the study to be conducted. What’s in it for them? The second report presents your recommendations and aims to convince the case study organization of the credibility of those results. Why should they follow your proposals?

As a part of the examination, both of the aforementioned reports are presented before the class. These presentations are compulsory and may influence your grade. For each of the two reports, you are also obliged to read the report of one of the other groups in the class. During their presentation, you are expected to act as the opponent.

Approved reports and presentations.

Robert Lagerström

Pontus Johnson

• All members of a group are responsible for the group's work.
• In any assessment, every student shall honestly disclose any help received and sources used.
• In an oral assessment, every student shall be able to present and answer questions about the entire assignment and solution.

Master thesis project

Replaces EH2040 Industrial Information Systems, Systems Engineering and EH2050 Industrial Information Systems, Case Studies