Titulo Estágio
EA@SONAE – Preventing and Mitigating Enterprise Architecture Erosion
Áreas de especialidade
Sistemas de Informação
Local do Estágio
DEI-FCTUC, SONAE BIT
Enquadramento
Companies are constantly evolving their architecture. This process is particularly complex in multinational organizations like SONAE, national leaders in the food retail sector. Large teams of different experts cooperate on a daily basis in the technological and organizational transformations that keeps their strategy successful. The architectural decisions affect over 34.000 workers at SONAE MC, ultimately, influencing their long-term incumbent position.
Designing the as-is and to-be architectures are important descriptive steps in sustaining the momentum of digital transformation. However, the prescriptive nature of enterprise architecture (Saat et al., 2010) is even more valuable to define the guidelines of change (Hoogervorst, 2004). New responsibilities emerge for enterprise architects, for example, planning the transformation of the business with new technologies, communicating the architecture, ensuring quality practices, incorporating new architectural capacities, or managing the phase-out or simplification of architectural elements (e.g. legacy applications).
Shifting from descriptive to prescriptive architectural practices raises many challenges for large companies supported by hundreds or thousands of applications in their infrastructure. There are representation issues, for example, the difficulty of connecting a plethora of elements in each layer of the available frameworks and languages (e.g. Archimate). There are also potential misalignments between the business needs and its information technology (IT), for example, introducing constant changes in the application layer, producing the “erosion” phenomena.
Erosion is a popular concept in software product lines, occurring when “modifications to a system that violate its architectural principles can degrade system performance and shorten its useful lifetime” (De Silva and Balasubramaniam, 2012). However, erosion has been scarcely studied in the enterprise architecture field, where multiple layers of both social and technical elements change at an accelerated pace (e.g. strategy erosion, business erosion, IT erosion).
References
Hoogervorst, J. (2004). Enterprise architecture: Enabling integration, agility and change. International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems, 13(03), 213-233.
Saat, J., Franke, U., Lagerstrom, R., & Ekstedt, M. (2010, October). Enterprise architecture meta models for IT/business alignment situations. In 2010 14th IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (pp. 14-23).
De Silva, L., & Balasubramaniam, D. (2012). Controlling software architecture erosion: A survey. Journal of Systems and Software, 85(1), 132-151.
Objetivo
The main goal of the thesis is to study enterprise architecture change in one of the most important retail groups in Portugal.
Departing from inspiring research in the field of software engineering about “erosion” and the existing practices at SONAE BIT for managing architectural changes, the student will identify the most effective practices to prevent enterprise architecture erosion and make architectural changes more visible in the existing platforms used at SONAE, ensuring alignment between business and IT.
The main objectives of this work are:
1. Identify practices to prevent enterprise architecture erosion in complex organizational settings.
2. Propose best practices for preventing enterprise architecture erosion or mitigating the effects of erosion at SONAE MC (for example, best approaches to the phase-out of architectural elements such as unused or obsolete applications and the implications in other layers of the architecture).
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
The main phases for the first semester are presented as follows (may overlap):
1) Study of the state-of-the-art: enterprise architecture change/maintenance; software architecture erosion.
Start: September 2020
Duration: 2 months
2) Contacts with the enterprise architecture team at SONAE BIT to understand their current projects, challenges, and the practices to manage architectural changes in retail.
Start: September 2020
Duration: 2 months
3) Clarify the concept of “enterprise architecture erosion” and present a list of candidate practices used at SONAE and in extant literature (e.g. from software architecture) to test in the second semester.
Start: November 2020
Duration: 1 month
Results of the 1st semester:
• Literature review about enterprise architecture erosion
• Contact with enterprise architecture practices at SONAE BIT
• Intermediate report.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
The main phases for the second semester are presented as follows (may overlap):
4) Participate in different projects of architectural change at SONAE (e.g. enterprise architecture quality assurance, architecture simplification).
Start: January 2021
Duration: 4 months
5) Evaluate and refine the best practices for preventing or mitigating enterprise architecture erosion.
Start: February 2021
Duration: 3 months
6) Writing of the thesis and a scientific paper
Start: May 2021
Duration: 2 months
Results of the 2nd semester:
• Scientific publication: Enterprise Architecture Erosion
• Final report
Condições
The student will be integrated in a joint research project of the Information Systems group (ISG) of CISUC and SONAE BIT, in Porto. Monthly stipend may be available when traveling to SONAE BIT Tech Hub facilities.
Observações
The collaboration with the enterprise architecture team at SONAE BIT will require remote work and regular travel to SONAE BIT Tech Hub.
Orientador
João Barata
barata@dei.uc.pt 📩