Towards an agile and adaptive Enterprise

Abstract

This paper contributes to the challenge of enterprises responding to factors that require a change and transformation. It proposes a concept that can be adopted by enterprises’ organizational functions to empower agility and adaptability as a response to this challenge. The concept fills the gap of transformation challenges towards agility and adaptiveness. This is of particular relevance for classic and hierarchical-oriented businesses in a frequently faster-changing world. The main element of the concept describes a stepwise thinking pattern intended to guide a function's adaption process. It builds on industry-wide accepted principles of adaptive enterprises and applies the concept of reference architectures that shows a potential application of the stepwise approach in more detail. This paper builds around industry experiences that have the function of Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM). This is because the EAM function plays a central role in driving its enterprise with transparency and decision support in the process of transformation.