Enterprise Architecture Resilience by Design: A Method and Case Study Demonstration

In the past decades, a broad range of technological innovations have helped organizations reach new levels of performance and have shaped the economies of the world and societies of the future. However, unexpected events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the blocking of the Suez Canal, have shown that many organizations are unprepared to deal with the impact of the disturbances that can occur. Thus, organizations are challenged to include resilience in the design of their Information Systems and Enterprise Architectures (EAs). We respond to this challange and propose a five-step method aimed to help organizations design resilient enterprise architectures to be able to better deal with (un-) expected disturbances. Our method builds upon the ‘EA resilience by design’ paradigm, combines knowledge from several domains, namely resilience, risk analysis, and EA, and leverages the ArchiMate 3.1 language to model several resilience characteristics. Using a case study at a leading manufacturing organization in the agri-food sector in Lithuania, we demonstrate the applicability of our method and draw some early lessons learned based on our very first evaluation with experts.