All large vendors of standard business software have announced to move to service oriented architecture. They claim benefits for their customers with regard to agility and openness. In contrast to the design of software services which has been a focus of research in the computer science community in recent years, the design of enterprise services has not been addressed as much by the information systems research community. This paper outlines a research program on the design of enterprise services. The necessity of different service understandings on different layers of enterprise architecture is shown, conceptual foundations for the design of enterprise services are presented, and first results of developing a method for enterprise service design are proposed.

Due to its importance for the development and the implementation of standard software applications in organizations, reference modeling has gained intensive coverage by IS researchers as well as by practitioners. Method engineering is covered less, in particular by IS practice. There is evidence that the basic construction and application principles for reference models and methods are similar. The goal of this paper is to analyze reuse potentials. As a conceptual basis, the state-of-theart of reference modeling and reference model application as well as the state-of-the-art of method engineering and method application are presented. Reuse potentials are systematically analyzed, and future research directions in this area are outlined.

Aside of day-today business in some organizations Enterprise Architecture (EA) seems to be successful while it is not in others that also have notations, models, methods, and even dedicated EA tools. In order to understand these differences we have analyzed the development of EA in six companies over the last eight years. Our analyses showed, that apart from formal structure and processes (i) training and education of architects and non-architects, (ii) improving architects' communication skills, (iii) intensifying EA representation in projects, and (iv) tool support (not replacements with tools), significantly contribute to long term EA success.

As a result of the rigor vs. relevance debate, researchers who focus on design research on organizational problems are beginning to focus on their research methodology's rigor. One of the means to lever the standards is the explicit establishment of defined language communities. This paper investigates to what extent current design research focusing on organizational problems is satisfying the requirements to establish such language communities. As research on organizational problems in IS research is still a very broad field, this paper focuses on research on enterprise architecture (EA). It contributes a state of the art overview on EA research regarding the research methodology employed and their language community state. Results show that local language communities in EA research do exist, but still have to lever their standards-both regarding the quality of the language communities and the quality of the design research.

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