Member Login

Press Releases

12/8/2011 - Alfabet makes million dollar donation to EA Center

12/8/2011 - Cameron is invited speaker at World CIO Forum

11/30/2011 - Wirpo conference charts the future of EA Center at Penn State

9/28/2011 - Federation of Enterprise Architecture Professional Organizations (FEAPO) signs charter

7/29/2011 - Pinnacle Business Group donates $3.2 million to Penn State Center for Enterprise Architecture

6/1/2011 - Armstrong Process Group donates 9 Million to the Center for Enterprise Architecture

5/6/2011 - Dr. Cameron was recently awarded the Career Achievement Award from The Network Professional Association

4/15/2011 - Architecture & Governance Magazine publishes article on the Center for Enterprise Architecture

02/14/2011 - Enterprise Architecture professional organizations launch FEAPO

1/19/2011 - Center for Enterprise Architecture Launched!

09/27/2010 - Enterprise Architecture Group 2nd Annual Meeting

10/7-9/2009 - Gartner publishes article on Enterprise Architecture Initiative

09/28/2009 - EA Advisory Group September Kick-off Meeting was a great success!

Industry Association Partners

The Business Architects Association

The Object Management Group

Research Engagements

The Center for Enterprise Architecture explores research concerns as a complete information chain that spans several layers in an Enterprise Architecture. A number of traditional disciplines such as software engineering and organization science as well as specific areas of research such as project management and change management are critical to these research concerns. The areas of research are, however, difficult to combine because of their different theoretical foundations, value systems, and research priorities that dictate their use of research approaches and research methodologies. To achieve this synergy, the Center expands beyond a simple assembly of diverse expertise and research methods. A driving force is the Engaged Scholarship model, which requires that the source of problems are identified in the practice of EA, instead of abstracted theoretical statements. The complex and often messy practice of EA will provide a key input to the identification of problems. A variety of research methods are applied including a traditional paradigm of observation and explanation, as well as considering design and action in the organizational and technological spheres of EA as a mode of investigation. This requires the development of new principles and concepts to link current academic research in the source disciplines identified above with the practice and situated knowledge as it is enacted in the practice of EA. The round-trips from theory to practice and back, and from practice to theory and back will be a hallmark of the research efforts that the Center undertakes. The role of industry participants are therefore not only be restricted to a passive provider of access to settings but also an active collaborator who will shape the understanding of the situated problem following models of research such as collaborative practice research. Engagement with industry participants is, therefore a crucial component of the Center.

Research Themes

Research themes of the Center include a spectrum of concerns that were surfaced, debated and endorsed by the industry participants during the meetings in 2009. These range from arriving at a better understanding of the state of the practice and art of EA, determining the relationship of the emerging EA concepts to those in more established fields of work, developing new concepts and measures to guide and determine the value of EA, and developing grounded, case-study-based guidelines that can benefit the practice and research of EA. The inherently intertwined nature of IT and Enterprise functioning means these research themes are difficult to describe with a traditional, linear approach. Instead, holistic characterizations are critical to ensure that the research themes are not pigeonholed into narrow research concerns. The Engaged Scholarship model outlined above is followed to ensure that the research efforts will simultaneously engage both research and practice in a collaborative mode.

A number of traditional research disciplines and techniques contribute to these research themes, including but not restricted to decision-making, data analytics and visualization, enterprise modeling and simulation, knowledge management, project portfolio management, information strategy, and socio-technical systems. The research efforts integrate a variety of research areas to achieve new insights, theories, and concepts that bridge theory and practice in both directions. A hallmark of the research themes pursued by the Center will, therefore, be to go beyond the "theory-to-practice" motto, instead, embracing a "mutual informing between theory and practice" that acknowledges and leverages the inherently situated nature of EA efforts. These linkages between the technology and enterprise realms and between theory and practice contain the potential for synergistic advances not only in the emerging field of EA but also in the contributing fields.

The holistic nature of research endeavors aimed at understanding and improving the craft and practice of EA would mean that a number of disciplines are implicated in defining the problem domain as well as contribute perspectives, approaches and techniques that are valuable for addressing EA research concerns. The figure below depicts how research on EA can benefit from these perspectives contributed by a number of allied disciplines.

Relating Enterprise Architecture Research to Allied Disciplines

Examples of research challenges the Center addresses in these areas include the following types of questions and issues:

What are elements of informal knowledge about IT infrastructure and organizational operations gathered during the construction of EA models? What are the potential uses of such informal knowledge in conjunction with EA models? How can such informal knowledge be represented and shared with decision makers?
How do large, enterprise-wide interventions progress through the change and implementation cycles? How do stakeholder roles and perceptions contribute to project success and failures? What early warnings, if any, can be detected to manage risks in large enterprise-wide change efforts?
What are the categories of lessons learned during EA practice? What are the best practices across industry for expertise sharing? Can expertise-sharing models from other domains be used and useful for EA?
What is the state of the art in value metrics for EA programs? What might constitute a viable metric-suite for measuring value of EA programs? What data may be useful for generating baselines for metrics in this metric-suite and how might this data be accessed and shared?
What is the state of the art in measuring the goodness of EA models? What might constitute an initial metric-suite for measuring EA models?
How do stakeholder relationships evolve during EA efforts? What are the approaches to effective management of these relationships? How can the co-evolution of the enterprise and technology infrastructure be coordinated and managed for more effective outcomes from EA efforts?
What are the key styles and patterns in the current practice of EA and how can these be codified? What are the key dimensions and determinants of these key styles and patterns? i.e., how can they be distinguished from one another? How are they related to one another, for example, can they be combined, how and under what conditions, can they be refined, how and under what conditions?
How can project portfolios be prioritized for the purpose of coordinating EA efforts? What criteria might provide useful approaches for prioritizing?

The research mission of the Center for Enterprise Architecture is to conduct integrative, multi-disciplinary research in EA-related areas to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and agility of our partnering organizations. In order to meet this mission, our research goes beyond conventional university models and strives to create a partnership between academia, industry, and the public sector to:

Continuously evolve an understanding of the needs of the public and private sector through direct contact with a wide variety of EA professionals and organizations and utilizing field data collected in partnership these stakeholders to advance the discipline.
Identify basic research themes that have a clear relationship to the needs of our partners.
Educate public and private sector decision makers about the discipline of enterprise architecture in order to more effectively leverage this evolving field to better align the enterprise and gain competitive advantage.

The Center for Enterprise Architecture within the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State provides a focused hub of expertise and resources to serve client organizations. We are reducing theory to practice around key themes that challenge public and private organizations through five key ways:

Conducting projects with industry collaborators, government sponsors and others to confront demanding problems and provide thought leadership around EA-related issues
Developing cross-organizational and cross-industry models to create benchmarks and scorecards that client companies can use to assess themselves
Creating a cadre of new enterprise architecture professionals who are trained in and experienced with the demands of this evolving profession
Providing a neutral meeting place where client organizations can interact with faculty and other advisory group members and to explore possible solutions to common problems
Publishing leading edge collaborative research in a variety of EA-related areas

There are several types of research engagement models that are possible. Examples include:

Sponsorship of undergraduate honors thesis research project: Your research question is matched with an IST undergraduate honors students who will investigate an area of mutual interest for a period of one to two years.
Participation in a collective research agenda where resources are pulled from multiple organizations to explore research areas of common interest.
Sponsorship of a larger research initiative where a team consisting of one or more faculty members and one or more graduate students explores a specified research area for your organization.

For more information on these and other possible research engagement models, please contact us.

Download a copy of our recent meta analysis of nine EA compentency models used internally by some of our corporate and government partners.

Download a copyof our recent meta analysis of nine EA related glossaries used internally by some of our corporate and government partners.

Coming Soon!

Survey on Enterprise Architecture: Current State of Practice

The College of Information Sciences and Technology at The Pennsylvania State University is in the process of conducting a study of people that lead enterprise architecture functions. This study has the support and participation from several leading EA industry associations and research firms: The Open Group, The Association of Open Group Enterprise Architects (AOGEA), The Association for Enterprise Integration (AFEI), The Industry Advisory Council (IAC) - Enterprise Architecture Shared Interest Group (SIG), The Object Management Group (OMG), The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO), and Gartner. The results of the survey will be shared with the EA community and will make a great contribution to our understanding of three primary areas of study:

EA Framework Usage - a profile of how the popular EA frameworks and methodologies are used in a large cross-section of organizations and industries and how these frameworks have been adapted and modified into "hybrid" approaches
EA Value Measurement - a profile of how the value of enterprise architecture is measured in a large cross-section of organizations and industries
Demographic of People that Lead EA Functions - a profile of the people in leadership roles in enterprise architecture