Gerrit Versteeg (enterprise architect)

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Gerrit Versteeg (born c. 1960) is a Dutch enterprise architect and management consultant, known for his work in defining the field of business architecture. [1] [2] [3]

Contents

Biography

Versteeg started his studies at the HTS Amsterdam in 1977, where he received his BA in Information Technology in 1981. During his career he received another BA in Business Informatics at the HEAO Utrecht in 1987, his MA in Strategic Management from the Rotterdam School of Management in 2000, and pursued his PhD research in Business Architecture at the Delft University of Technology from 2004 to 2007.

Versteeg started his career as Sales Consultant for the Holland Data Groep in 1983. In 1984 he joined Volmac, which was by Capgemini in 1992, as IT consultant. From 1986 to 1997 he also worked at the Postbank as Project Leader, and became Architect. In 1996 he joined the FourPoints Business Intelligence firm, that supplies IT services in the field of Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence and Marketing Solutions.

Work

Business architecture

In the 2006 article "Business Architecture: A new paradigm to relate business strategy to ICT," Versteeg & Bouwman explained the essence of business architecture. [4] They wrote:

We use the concept of 'Business Architecture’ to structure the responsibility over business activities prior to any further effort to structure individual aspects (processes, data, functions, organization, etc.). The business architecture arranges the responsibilities around the most important business activities (for instance production, distribution, marketing, et cetera) and/or economic activities (for instance manufacturing, assembly, transport, wholesale, et cetera) into domains [5]

And furthermore:

The business architecture forms a significantly better basis for subsequent architectures than the separate statements themselves. The business architecture gives direction to organizational aspects, such as the organizational structuring (in which the responsibilities of the business domains are assigned to individuals/business units in the organization chart or where a new organization chart is drawn) and the administrative organization (describing for instance the financial reconciliation mechanisms between business domains). Assigning the various business domains to their owners (managers) also helps the further development of other architectures, because now the managers of these domains can be involved with a specific assigned responsibility. This led to increased involvement of top-level management, being domain-owners and well aware of their role. Detailed portions of business domains can be developed based on the effort and support of the domain-owners involved. Business architecture therefore is a very helpful pre-structuring device for the development, acceptance and implementation of subsequent architectures. [6]

Business architecture and business strategy

About the relation between business architecture and business strategy, Versteeg & Bouwman wrote:

Business Architecture is directly based on business strategy. It is the foundation for subsequent architectures (strategy embedding), where it is detailed into various aspects and disciplines. The business strategy can consist of elements like strategy statements, organizational goals and objectives, generic and/or applied business models, etc. The strategic statements are analyzed and arranged hierarchically, through techniques like qualitative hierarchical cluster analysis. Based on this hierarchy the initial business architecture is further developed, using general organizational structuring methods and business administration theory, like theories on assets and resources and theories on structuring economic activity. Based on the business architecture the construction of the organization takes shape... During the strategy formulation phase and as a result of the design of the business architecture, the business strategy gets better formulated and understood as well as made more internally consistent. [6]

Versteeg & Bouwman also stipulated, that "the perspectives for subsequent design next to organization are more common: information architecture, technical architecture, process architecture. The various parts (functions, concepts and processes) of the business architecture act as a compulsory starting point for the different subsequent architectures. It pre-structures other architectures. Business architecture models shed light on the scantly elaborated relationships between business strategy and business design. We will illustrate the value of business architecture in a case study." [6]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

Chief information officer (CIO), chief digital information officer (CDIO) or information technology (IT) director, is a job title commonly given to the most senior executive in an enterprise who works with information technology and computer systems, in order to support enterprise goals.

An information system (IS) is a formal, sociotechnical, organizational system designed to collect, process, store, and distribute information. From a sociotechnical perspective, information systems are composed by four components: task, people, structure, and technology. Information systems can be defined as an integration of components for collection, storage and processing of data of which the data is used to provide information, contribute to knowledge as well as digital products that facilitate decision making.

Information technology (IT) governance is a subset discipline of corporate governance, focused on information technology (IT) and its performance and risk management. The interest in IT governance is due to the ongoing need within organizations to focus value creation efforts on an organization's strategic objectives and to better manage the performance of those responsible for creating this value in the best interest of all stakeholders. It has evolved from The Principles of Scientific Management, Total Quality Management and ISO 9001 Quality management system.

Enterprise architecture (EA) is an analytical discipline that provides methods to comprehensively define, organize, standardize, and document an organization’s structure and interrelationships in terms of certain critical business domains characterizing the entity under analysis. The goal of EA is to create an effective representation of the business enterprise that may be used at all levels of stewardship to guide, optimize, and transform the business as it responds to real-world conditions. EA serves to capture the relationships and interactions between domain elements as described by their processes, functions, applications, events, data, and employed technologies.

A functional software architecture (FSA) is an architectural model that identifies enterprise functions, interactions and corresponding IT needs. These functions can be used as a reference by different domain experts to develop IT-systems as part of a co-operative information-driven enterprise. In this way, both software engineers and enterprise architects can create an information-driven, integrated organizational environment.

Organizational architecture

Organizational architecture has two very different meanings. In one sense it literally refers to the organization's built environment and in another sense it refers to architecture metaphorically, as a structure which fleshes out the organizations. The various features of a business's organizational architecture has to be internally consistent in strategy, architecture and competitive environment.

A federal enterprise architecture framework (FEAF) is the U.S. reference enterprise architecture of a federal government. It provides a common approach for the integration of strategic, business and technology management as part of organization design and performance improvement.

Technology strategy is the overall plan which consists of objectives, principles and tactics relating to use of technologies within a particular organization. Such strategies primarily focus on the technologies themselves and in some cases the people who directly manage those technologies. The strategy can be implied from the organization's behaviors towards technology decisions, and may be written down in a document. The strategy includes the formal vision that guide the acquisition, allocation, and management of IT resources so it can help fulfill the organizational objectives.

Design management Field of inquiry in business

Design management is a field of inquiry that uses project management, design, strategy, and supply chain techniques to control a creative process, support a culture of creativity, and build a structure and organization for design. The objective of design management is to develop and maintain an efficient business environment in which an organization can achieve its strategic and mission goals through design. Design management is a comprehensive activity at all levels of business, from the discovery phase to the execution phase. "Simply put, design management is the business side of design. Design management encompasses the ongoing processes, business decisions, and strategies that enable innovation and create effectively-designed products, services, communications, environments, and brands that enhance our quality of life and provide organizational success." The discipline of design management overlaps with marketing management, operations management, and strategic management.

Enterprise architecture framework Frame in which the architecture of a company is defined

An enterprise architecture framework defines how to create and use an enterprise architecture. An architecture framework provides principles and practices for creating and using the architecture description of a system. It structures architects' thinking by dividing the architecture description into domains, layers, or views, and offers models - typically matrices and diagrams - for documenting each view. This allows for making systemic design decisions on all the components of the system and making long-term decisions around new design requirements, sustainability, and support.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to management:

Enterprise modelling

Enterprise modelling is the abstract representation, description and definition of the structure, processes, information and resources of an identifiable business, government body, or other large organization.

Business architecture

In the business sector, business architecture is a discipline that "represents holistic, multidimensional business views of: capabilities, end‐to‐end value delivery, information, and organizational structure; and the relationships among these business views and strategies, products, policies, initiatives, and stakeholders."

Master of Business Informatics (MBI) is a postgraduate degree in Business Informatics (BI). BI programs combine information technology (IT) and management courses and are common in central Europe. The first master programs in Business Informatics were offered by the University of Rostock, as a face-to-face program, and by the Virtual Global University (VGU) together with the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) as an online program . An MBI programme, which includes inter-cultural studies affecting business operations in European markets, was first offered by Dublin City University. Within the Bologna process, many Central European universities have been, or are in the process of, setting up master programmes in Business Informatics. Due to legal frameworks and restrictions, however, most of these programs are forced to award an M.Sc. degree instead of an MBI degree.

Richard Veryard FRSA is a British computer scientist, author and business consultant, known for his work on service-oriented architecture and the service-based business.

Steven Howard Spewak was an American management consultant, author, and lecturer on enterprise architectures, known for the development of Enterprise Architecture Planning (EAP).

Johannes Adrianus Petrus (Jan) Hoogervorst is a Dutch organizational theorist, business executive, management consultant, and Professor Enterprise Governance and Enterprise Engineering at the University of Antwerp, known for his work in the field of enterprise engineering.

The history of business architecture has its origins in the 1980s. In the next decades business architecture has developed into a discipline of "cross-organizational design of the business as a whole" closely related to enterprise architecture. The concept of business architecture has been proposed as a blueprint of the enterprise, as a business strategy, and also as the representation of a business design.

Willem Adriaan Gerrit Anton ("Harry") Bouwman is a Dutch Information systems researcher, and professor at the Åbo Akademi University, Institute for Advanced Management Systems Research, known for his work on mobile services, business models and business architecture.

The Business Architecture Special Interest Group (BASIG) is a working group on business architecture of the Object Management Group (OMG), known for their contribution to the history of business architecture. This working group was founded in 2007 as the Business Architecture Working Group (BAWG).

References

  1. Janssen, Marijn, and George Kuk. "A complex adaptive system perspective of enterprise architecture in electronic government." System Sciences, 2006. HICSS'06. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on. Vol. 4. IEEE, 2006.
  2. Glissman, Susanne, and Jorge Sanz. "A Comparative Review of Business Architecture." IBM Research Report, 2009.
  3. Glissmann, Susanne, and Jorge Sanz. "Business architectures for the design of enterprise service systems." Handbook of service science. Springer US, 2010. 251-282.
  4. Schelp, Joachim, and Robert Winter. "Language communities in enterprise architecture research." Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology. ACM, 2009.
  5. Versteeg & Bouwman (2006, p. 92), as cited in: McClure, Mark. Framing a Collaborative Enterprise Architecture Governance Program within the Context of Service-Oriented Software Systems Development. University of Oregon Applied Information Management Program, March 2007.
  6. 1 2 3 Versteeg, G & H. Bouwman. "Business Architecture: A new paradigm to relate business strategy to ICT." Information Systems Frontiers 8 (2006) pp. 91-102.