ADAM – the project

Through our research project about shadow IT and the analysed case studies, we have experienced that business-driven IT can be found in every organisation. Therefore, on the one hand there is the need to identify decentralised structures and to develop a concept for governing these structures. This has already been covered by the research project "shadow IT".

But furthermore, there is the need for long term management of these decentralised structures. Furthermore, Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is affected as well, which consists of the identification, planning and control of the whole organisation, including different views on organisation, processes, functions and data. EAM has to be expanded to include decentralised structures and to not only focus on officially managed systems.

Hence, different fields of action arise:

On the one hand, current enterprise architecture has to be identified. Tools are necessary that incoporate business-driven IT into the modeling. On the other hand it has to be decided, at what time the identification takes place. On the other hand, planning of future states of the enterprise architecture has to be considered as well. Control systems have to be developed, to establish structures that include business units into the planning process, which is traditionally anchored in the IT department. A governance has to be formed, which has already been covered by our shadow IT research. Furthermore, system boundaries have to be defined, which is the focus of our current research projekt "ADAM".