Towards Integration Methods of Product-IT into Enterprise Architectures

Digital innovation (DI), Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) offer new opportunities for enterprises but also cause new challenges for Enterprise Architecture Management. Based on an industrial case from power garden products illustrating potentials and challenges of DI and IoT, this paper investigates the integration of product-IT into enterprise architectures. Product-IT includes the embedded IT-systems in physical products and services, components for operations, maintenance or evaluation purposes. The paper investigates the suitability of traditional enterprise architecture layers for structuring product-IT, identifies problems in product-IT and enterprise-IT integration and challenges for the field of EAM. The main contributions of the paper are (1) to position the area of product-IT in the field of EAM, (2) to identify challenges from real-world cases regarding integration of product-IT into EA and (3) outline potential ways to approach the challenges.