The discipline of enterprise architecture advocates the use of models to support decision-making on enterprise-wide information system issues. In order to provide such support, enterprise architecture models should be amenable to analyses of various properties, as e.g. the level of enterprise information security. This paper proposes the use of a formal language to support such analysis. Such a language needs to be able to represent causal relations between, and definitions of, various concepts as well as uncertainty with respect to both concepts and relations. To support decision making properly, the language must also allow the representation of goals and decision alternatives. This paper evaluates a number of languages with respect to these requirements, and selects influence diagrams for further consideration. The influence diagrams are then extended to fully satisfy the requirements. The syntax and semantics of the extended influence diagrams are detailed in the paper, and their use is demonstrated in an example.
The challenge of IT management is today considerable. In industry, the organizational role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) has been promoted as the owner of these challenges. In spite of a general acceptance of the problems associated with the responsibilities of the CIO, very little academic research has been conducted on the issues and constraints of this role. In order to address these shortcomings, this article presents the results of a survey in which Swedish CIOs have prioritized their most important concerns. In academia, a response to the IT system management challenges has presented itself in the discipline of Enterprise Architecture. The article argues that the CIO role is the primary stakeholder of Enterprise Architecture, so his/her need for decision support should guide Enterprise Architecture research and framework development. Therefore, the article presents a brief review over how well two existing Enterprise Architecture frameworks address the surveyed concerns of the CIO. Results from the survey indicate that the three highest prioritized concerns of CIOs are to decrease the cost related to the business organization, to improve the quality of the interplay between the IT organization and the business organization and to provide new computer-aided support to the business organization. The comparison between the CIOs' prioritization and the foci of the frameworks shows some discrepancies. The largest disharmony lies in the lack of decision support for issues related to the IT organization. Furthermore, support for ex-
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