Enterprise Architecture (EA) is increasingly being utilized by organizations as an approach to manage the complexity of business processes, information systems and technical infrastructure. Although EA is generally regarded as an effective management tool, its full benefits can be realized only when it is incorporated into day-to-day operations of the organization. In the Finnish public sector, the use of EA has recently been mandated by the newly passed Act on Information Management Governance in Public Administration. The aim of the legislation is to achieve more efficient, integrated and costefficient public services. This article describes the results of a survey aimed to identify perceptions on actual EA work among Finnish public sector participants currently undertaking EA initiatives. The results highlight potential issues related to successful EA adoption.

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The business environment is changing faster than ever before. Successful navigation in these treacherous waters requires both business agility and capability to govern strategydriven business transformation. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is an approach providing insight and overview to manage the complexity of an organization and to aid strategic decisionmaking. Studies have tried to bridge the gap between EA and strategy, but very few empirical studies have been published on the subject. In this exploratory case study, we provide an empirical view of how EA can be connected to the strategic planning process and bring value to an organization. The findings are based on 13 interviews conducted in a large Nordic financial services group. This study strengthens the view that although EA could provide significant value in the strategy formulation phase it is still mainly a tool for translating the strategy into actions. EA can thus provide the most value in the strategy implementation phase of the strategic planning process.

Business Process Modeling has over the years focused in the activities and the logic how work gets done. That is reflected in the modeling notations like BPMN, which show the sequence of activities, their performers and the different paths each instance of the process can take. However, the performance of an organization and its business processes are measured aggregating the flow of the results of single process instances. Often the flows are not running smoothly but there are variations, delays, accumulations and other phenomena, which can be causes for the processes not to meet their expected performance levels. Therefore understanding the behavior of the business process over time is critical for any improvement initiative. In this paper we show how stocks and flows diagrams can be used to model business processes and how that model can be simulated to understand its behavior over time. Simulations can help in revealing the critical points to remove bottlenecks and improve the overall performance of the processes. First we a simple introduction to modeling business processes using stocks and flows diagrams. The we describe a real life case using stocks and flows models and simulation to reveal a problem and proposing a solution in health care environment.

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