A Business Ecosystem Architecture Modeling Framework

The concept of enterprise architecture (EA) introduced in the 1980s refers to business-IT alignment in a single organization. The concept has proven its utility in the practice of IT management, but EA frameworks cannot deal with network organizations that are enabled by IT. EA frameworks assume a hierarchically coordinated organization, where final responsibility for strategy rests with management. The characteristic feature of network organizations is that there is no central coordinator with final responsibility. Yet, today's network organizations are facilitated by IT and they too must be aligned with their IT infrastructure. To align networked organizations, we must take the value viewpoint, which is absent in EA. This paper presents an approach to business-IT alignment for networked organizations based on the concept of networked value models. In addition, since there is no hierarchical management in a network, we view business-IT alignment in a network as a coordination game, and we include results from coordination theory and game theory in our approach. We illustrate our approach with an example from the electricity business and apply it to the Bitcoin network.