Enterprise Architecture for Business Networks: A Constructivist Synthesis

A current limitation in Enterprise Architecture is to establish the adequacy of the modelling and analysis for dedicated business network planning to capture related artifacts. Much of the focus is on the modeling of interactions across organisations through coordinative artifacts such as processes, services, and resources. Thus, an analysis of how artifacts are shifted, as a whole, across partners, is only available in a limited range of interaction contexts. To overcome these issues, this paper develops constructivist insights by way of the key network planning requirements observed in common situations in business networks including headquartersubsidiary, business network orchestrator, and virtual organisation configurations. These requirements are discussed through a complex network application in the EGovernment domain, namely One-Stop Shop, citizencentric service delivery. An analysis of these requirements is provided as illustrative extensions for the ArchiMate language to support the business network context.