Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education: Processes, Principles, Challenges, Success Factors and Agility

Abstract

There has been growing interest in the use of Enterprise Architecture (EA) in the public sector, including in higher education (HE) institutions. Many HE institutions have adopted EA to help align their vision, objectives, and needs with their IT strategy and objectives, to support decision-making and to improve business processes. They have used specific tools, models and EA frameworks to simplify the adoption and development of EA. The main goal of this research is to answer the following question: How is EA being used in HE institutions and what lessons can be learned that will help improve EA in HE? To achieve our goal, we first conducted literature reviews (Chapter 2 and Chapter 3). These showed that there is a lack of studies of this topic, with gaps in knowledge about the longer-term evolution of EA implementation, tools and frameworks used, challenges and success factors of EA adoption, and the adoption of the agile EA. Then we followed an exploratory sequential mixed method process. We first used grounded analysis by conducting interviews with 21 higher education enterprise architects (HEEAs) in 6 countries. We analyzed the interviews and identified the main themes and categories. From these, we developed a survey and received responses from 115 HEEAs in 29 countries. Our key contributions are to present a descriptive analysis of EA in HE institutions and to provide a set of recommendations and lessons learned based on our findings. Some observations were these: Key motivations and objectives for HEEAs are to facilitate the alignment of projects with the university’s goals, to align business and IT sectors, to reduce duplication, and to enable digital transformation and automation. HEEAs do the vast majority of their modelling using generic tools like spreadsheets, with ease of use, cost-effectiveness, and collaboration being the most-needed tool attributes. Keeping models up to date and the lack of automatic population of data are key tool challenges. TOGAF is the dominant framework, but Gartner and CAUDIT approaches also have significant influence. Critical challenges include resistance to change and finding ways to support the university’s mission and goals. A key practice to follow is enterprise thinking. Most respondents indicated that their EA process was moderately agile.