Enterprise Business Architecture in Indonesia Higher Education: A Case Study

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1 Enterprise Business Architecture in Indonesia Higher Education: A Case Study Roni Yunis Department of Information System STMIK Mikroskil Medan, Indonesia roni@mikroskil.ac.id Kridanto Surendro Department of Informatics, STEI Institute of Technology Bandung Bandung, Indonesia endro@informatika.org Kristian Telaumbanua Department of Information System STMIK Mikroskil Medan, Indonesia kristian@mikroskil.ac.id Abstract In this paper we discuss the concept of enterprise business architecture. We explain a preliminary study the concept and, based on a case study, discuss its relevance, operation, relationship with strategy and business models, and value for Indonesia higher education. Enterprise business architecture contributes to clarify the complexity within an organization and form a useful starting point from which to develop functional, information, process and application architectures. In addition, an explicitly enterprise business architecture helps to structure the responsibilities within organization (higher education), and within the primary process as well as with regard to IT-support. Enterprise business architectures contribute to adequate IT strategies in order to manage the resources for critical business activities and how to manage the development and support for business efficiently. Keywords-enterprise business architecture; enterprise architecture; business modeling; business strategies I. INTRODUCTION Business demand for technology capabilities continues to grow, propelled by recognition of the impact technology has on business strategies and outcomes. Technology trends from cloud computing to the "consumer-centric" of technology to "IT-centric" of packaged applications open new doors for businesses to find solutions to their strategic needs. In such an environment, IT can t remain an order taker its relationship with business must evolve toward partnership, and enterprise architecture (EA) provides the glue for this partnership. EA goals in organization will be redefined to break out of its IT- Centric role to govern the interaction of all units and assets in an organization. It aims at creating value through effective collaboration and co-creation with business partners and customers [1]. As business rethinks or adds new strategic directions, how can EA ensure that business and IT work together on these transformations? As the technology landscape changes to make it easier for businesses to engage their customers and change their business models, how does EA provide the lens through which business and IT together evaluate these technologies? And to be effective at challenges like these, how should EA leaders market their relevance to business and IT priorities? The purpose of this paper will show Higher Education (HE) how to develop and use business architecture to align IT and business strategies. At the first, we discuss what is meant by the concept of Enterprise Business Architecture (EBA), EBA is becomes essential in the existing complex business scenario as is attempts to create a blueprint of why and how business can be done in detail, the enterprise vision, strategy, processes, and strategy execution [2]. Second, we will present how can uses EBA to determine the extent of alignment of their IT and business strategies, and how can a model for EBA be developed of case study on higher education. II. ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE There are myriad definitions of enterprise architecture (EA). The focus of enterprise architecture efforts is now shifting to become more holistic, thereby necessitating the use of comprehensive modeling tools to analyze and optimize the portfolio of business strategies, organizational structures, business processes/tasks and activities, information flows applications, and technology infrastructure [3]. There are several good definitions of EA. EA are like blueprints, drawing or modeling [4]. EA seek align enterprise processes and structure with their supporting IT s [5]. Authors Doucet, Getze, Saha and Bernard [6] state the defining describing and deploying EA is a large and complex undertaking that allows enterprise to: (1) understand business operations and uncover deeply embedded business rules, (2) elevate the role of information within the organization and treat it as a core asset, (3) understand gaps between information needs of the business and information provided by IT s, (4) create synergies between available and stable technologies and emerging technologies, and (5) leverage technologies to discover and take the advantage of new business opportunities. As indicated earlier, there are many different interpretations of the concept of EA. Though, most of the researchers and practitioners agree upon that EA consist of both a perspective of aligning enterprises business processes and of a technological perspective. High levels components of EA relationships business and IT strategies between business, data/information, application, and technologies/infrastructure. Level components in EA show in Fig. 1. Annual International Conference on Infocomm Technologies in Competitive Strategies (ICT 2010). Copyright GSTF ISBN: doi: / I

2 Figure 1. Components of Enterprise Architecture Architecture modelling conceptual in EA is influenced by four main layers, they are, business layer, data layer, application layer and technology layer. In business layer will be described three aspects, they are, structure, behaviour and information. These three aspects have an important role in business modelling, because in business modelling will be shown the connection in organization behaviour with the information needed and relations that occur in organizational structure. Therefore business architecture is a main thing that should be defined thoroughly before continuing to the next stage. According to Ralph Whittle dan Conrad Myrick [7], business architecture in enterprise can be connected with all components that exist in developing a EA, this can be seen as shown in Fig. 2. Figure 2. Relationship Business Architecture A. Enterprise Business Architecture EBA defines the enterprise value streams and their relationship to all external entities and other enterprise value streams and the events that trigger instantiation [7]. EBA serves to improve operations and the alignment of technologies to business needs: focus on value to the organization and the customer, find synergies in generic processes, and provide the blueprint for business transformation [8]. EBA are composed of architecture, workflow, and events [7]. Architectures Graphically portray the style and method of design and construction that comprises the elements of an enterprise and defines the purpose and interrelationships of those elements. Workflows Graphically portray how inputs are transformed to outputs for the enterprise. Workflows illustrate the flow of control, delays, sequencing and which entity performs the activity. Events Graphically portray when the enterprise must react in a pre-planned way. So, we can define EBA as the structure of components EA related to business and the manner these components interrelate among themselves and other architecture to created value. In our study, we concentrate only on identifying an exhaustive list of business architectures element from HE requirement and defining their relationship. In the contexts of this paper description of EBA provides the high-level representation of the business strategies, intentions, functions, processes, information and assets critical to providing services to HE, and the like. B. Business Modeling Business modeling is a technique to model business processes [9]. The benefits of business modeling is obtained a (an) align technology with business goals, by modeling the relationships between business processes and their underlying data, organizations are better able to take advantage of their technology. The are many purpose of business modeling [10]; (1) to understand the structure and the dynamics of organization in the target organization, (2) to understand current problems in the target organization and identify improvement potentials, (3) to ensure that customers, end users, and developers have a common understanding of the target organization, and (4) to derive the requirements needed to support the target organization. In Business Modeling we document business processes using so called business use cases (UML approach). This assures a common understanding among all stakeholders of what business process needs to be supported in the HE. The business use cases are analyzed to understand how the business should support the business processes in HE. The Table 1 below describes the business modeling notation and icons used in the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The businessspecific icons help distinguish business elements from elements in the visual models [11][12]. TABLE I. BUSINESS MODELING NOTATION USING UML Modeling icon Name Definition Business Actor Someone or something, outside the business that interacts with the business. Business Worker Role or set of roles inside the business. A business worker interacts with other business workers Business Entity A "thing" handled or used by business workers. «organization unit» Business Use Case Business Use Case Realization Organizational Unit A sequence of actions a business performs that yields an observable result of value to a particular business actor. A collection of diagrams to show how the realization organization elements (workers and entities) are deployed to support a business process. A collection of business workers, business entities, relationships, business usecase realizations, diagrams, and other organization units. DP2M, Directorate General of Higher Education Indonesia. 178

3 A wide variety of organization and business modeling are currently in use: there is no single standard for models in this domain. The conceptual domains that are covered differ from language to language. In many languages, the relations between domains are not clearly defined. Also, most languages are not really suitable to describe architectures: they provide concepts to model, e.g., detailed business processes, but not the high-level relationship. Some of the most popular languages are proprietary to specific software tools. Relevant languages in this category include: The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a standard for business process modeling, and provides a graphical notation for specifying business processes in a Business Process Diagram (BPD) [13], based on a flowcharting technique very similar to activity diagrams from UML. IDEF originating from the US Ministry of Defense is a collection of 16 (unrelated) diagramming techniques, three of which are widely used: IDEF0 (function modeling), IDEF1/IDEF1x (information and data modelling) and IDEF3 (process description) [14]. One of the major advantages of using a modeling technique for business modeling that is similar to a technique for IS development is that you are speaking the same language [9][10]. It facilitates understanding how something described in the business domain might relate to something belonging in the domain. It also simplifies describing the relationships between and among artifacts in business models and corresponding artifacts in models. Business modeling as defined in the EBA is aimed at providing a series of techniques and notation to enable the practitioner in describing and understanding business processes. In particular, the techniques are aimed at describing the business process in such a way that the impact on IS s becomes clear. The business modeling workflow in the EBA can be used as a component in a business process reengineering (BPR) effort [9], a component that concentrates on providing support for the development of the right IS in organization. III. EBA MODEL IN HIGHER EDUCATION In general, there are three main missions of HE in Indonesia consisting of education, research and community services, referred as Tri Dharma. Structure of the business process model in HE most widely used in previous studies is uses a value chain diagram [15][16] as show in Fig. 3 with the business areas at the highest level followed business domain and business function. The value chain in Fig. 3 identifier seven process namely organization management, human resources management, asset management and infrastructure, marketing, student management, studies management, and research management and services. Organization management process; involves strategic planning, budgeting, both financial and managerial accounting, and revenue management. Human resources management process; it consists of organization and position management, recruitment, personnel administration, time management, personnel development and training, conpensation and benefit administration, and payroll accounting. Asset management and infrastructure process; involves management of inventory, facility, vendor management, and procurement. HE marketing process; the process involves all marketing activities and services required to recruit prospective students, and alumni services. Figure 3. Business Process Model in Higher Education Student management process; encompasses recruitment, admission, registration, student record management, student receivaibles, student portal, and service like financial aids, and library services. Studies management process; includes academic program development, class and examination planning, resources management and scheduling, academic advising and career placement, learning architecture and media services. Research management and services process; consists of planning and grants application, research and services management, financial accounting and reimbursement for sponsored programs, reporting to sponsors, and closeout. The EBA is the driving component behind the development of overall enterprise information architecture (EIA), enterprise application architecture (EAA), and enterprise technology architecture (ETA) for the HE. Various components of that architecture are normally defined by HE business leadership, and not by an information technology unit. Those components include the business strategies and intent, the to be business architecture, and the gap analysis to determine those steps or initiatives required to move the as is baseline to the target to be business architecture. Example of business process workflow with application in HE as show in Table 2. TABLE II. EXAMPLE OF BUSINESS WORKFLOW STUDENT MANAGEMENT PROCESS Actor Activity Application Student Search academic information Academic portal. Candidate and encompasses recruitment Student Candidate Admission, examination, and admission information Admissions information Student Registration and payment Registration Student Create credit semester Academic information Student Learning architecture E-learning Student resource and library Digital library Student Search schoolarship Student portal 179

4 Actor Activity Application Student Create study cards and transcript Academic information Student Heregistration and payment Registration Student Final/Minor project enrollment Project and research enrollment Alumni Graduation enrollment Academic information Alumni Academic advising and career placement Alumni and career portal In HE environment, business process for enterprise application is identified as sequences of linked functional level activities, which take inputs and produce outputs. This is applied for all cases, in administrative, student management process, and studies management process. IV. CASE STUDY Many HE and research organizations spend the bulk of their IT budgets on maintaining existing infrastructure and integrating heterogeneous s, leaving few resources for innovation. Tying disparate IT solutions help you improve student services, gain financial control, enhance operational visibility, improve strategic decision making, and reduce costs. The solutions support the following key business activities. However, how to development IT/IS that appropriate to the needs of HE business strategies? The EBA can be used to define properly the existing requirement business, and support the development of integrated s strategies. EBA exist to optimize and align internalization IT resources with business goals/objectives. Alignment of decision-making through the internalization mechanism is done by mapping the goals, objectives, and mechanisms of IT to the goals, objectives, tools, and mechanisms for HE organizations. The schema of alignment process in HE can be seen as Fig. 4. Loop in Fig. 4 shows that the process of aligning IT decisions take place dynamically and continuously, along with the dynamics of the and experienced academic and administrative processes. Dynamics itself emerged because of environmental changes on the, whether caused by internal and external factors. The diagram also explains the position of IT as an enabler for progress in achieving the goals that have been determined. Utilization of IT itself is not the final goal to be achieved. As was the case in the control of physical processes, processes such as in Fig. 4 is a process that is measurable. There are certain goals to be achieved through alignment of IT decisions with core business of HE, and these objectives have a clear indicator. If within a certain time snapshot targets are not achieved, there needs to be analyzed to produce the correction or modification that is expected to improve the situation. Within this framework, monitoring and evaluation becomes a vital instrument. Given the objectives, strategies, and the condition of higher education that is different, there is no single solution that is universal alignment. STMIK Mikroskil is a private university with three campuses, in Medan of North Sumatera, Indonesia ( STMIK Mikroskil is one of 328 HE in North Sumatera [17]. STMIK Mikroskil has a total number of students studying in its campuses, and has a total number of 104 lecturers in working in The consensus among STMIK Mikroskil executives was that the university s existing s needed to be improved in line with rapid changes in the HE sector. There were also major concerns about being able to grow the university and become more global without integrated s capability. STMIK Mikroskil decided that it would review the s for Student, Finance, and Human Resources. The review team consisted of primarily directorlevel executives and higher-level managers. Their recommended were that STMIK Mikroskil replaces its legacy s with common integrated s. The draft model of integration in HE as show in Fig. 5. Figure 4. The Schema of Alignment IT and Business Process in Higher Education Figure 5. The Model of Integration System in Higher Education 180

5 It was felt that the new should at a minimum (1) seamlessly integrate STMIK Mikroskil Finance, Human Resources and students functions, (2) be reliable and affordable and (3) have the flexibility to support STMIK Mikroskil unique business processes. The general models of the EBA in this case study will be discussed as follows in Fig. 5. The Enterprise Business Model presented in Fig. 5 represents the as is business model of the Human Resources Management (HRM) at HE, independent of the organizations that perform the various functions defined in the model. The as is EBA identifies all the units in HE that currently perform some or all of each function defined in the model. Chairman Recruitment Position Management Head of Department Vice Chairman Dev elopment and Training The as is EBA also defines functions that are applicable to unit and that are provided substantially or wholly by an external provider for that unit. It also defines functions that are applicable to unit and that the unit makes available for other units organizations to use (cross unit). Examples of cross unit functions include: Payroll services provided by the unit of HR. Compensation and Benefit Time Management Student Management Finance Management Payroll Accounting Position Management Chairman Vice Chairman Academics Staff Accounting Staff Recruitment Head of Department Dev elopment and Training Figure 7. to be HRM Business Model Recruitment Business Model Prepare Staffing Plans Recruit Applicants Compensation and Benefit Time Management Head of Depatment HRM Applicants Assign Employees Payroll Accounting Chairman Issue Referrals Apply Recommended Pay Scales Documen Recruitment and Staffing Actions Accounting Staff Vice Chairman Figure 6. as is HRM Business Model The to be EBA once a business owner is found and the architecture component is completed. The to be EBA should define the services to be delivered by HRM requirement, and how HE should be organized to effectively and efficiently deliver those services. This is will contain the gap analysis that defines the steps and initiatives that are needed to move the as is EBA to the to be EBA. In Fig. 6 is reserved and will be completed by the business owner of the to be EBA once that architecture component is completed. Typically the gap analysis will identify a set of detailed steps or initiatives that must be accomplished to move the HE from the as is environment to the desired to be environment (see examples in Fig. 7). Figure 8. Detail Recruitment Business Model According to business modelling which has been explained before, the next step is modelling the software, modelling software can be started from conceptual model to implementating model. UML support in modeling software is pretty much; some of the functions are modeling software with use case diagram, sequence diagram, and deployment diagram. One advantage of business modeling are its clear and concise way of showing dependencies between business and models [10] Fig. 9 shows this relationship. To identify information- use cases, begin with the business workers in the business object model. In the case, we applied business process recruits applicants in Fig. 8 for used model to next 181

6 step in modeling. For each business worker, identify a candidate actor. For each business use case the business actor participates in, create a candidate use case, and analysis model. For examples, see Fig. 10, Fig. 11, and Fig. 12. ApplicantsProfile Candidates Busi ness Model ing Business Use Case Model Business Object Model Status Analysis Figure 12. Analysis Model of Recruitment Applicants Use Case Model Implementation Model «device» Design Model Testing Model One of the biggest challenges in planning is to ensure that higher education IT: (1) alignment between IT architecture, IT plans with business reguirements; (2) a balance between IT efficiency and business innovation. The second major challenge can only be achieved if there is a model that ensures the integration between business architecture with IT architecture. The main benefits of the existence of the EBA is to optimize the entire enterprise is often comprised of a fragmented legacy s (both manual and an automated) in an integrated environment that is adaptive to change and support the business strategy Applicants Figure 9. Relationship Business Modeling and System Model : :Applicants Profile : Head of Department HRM :Applicants of Status :Job Analysis :Candidates Figure 10. Business Object Model of Recruitment Applicants Recruitment Applicants System V. CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION In this paper, we have presented an approach for enterprise business architecture and business modeling in higher education. Enterprise business architecture helps to clarify the alignment between the business and IT strategies of an higher education organization, in use case and the conceptual model are centered on the use of UML business use case diagram. The enterprise business architecture model is complex especially for higher education environment because they have multiple perspective, objectives and strategies. Using approach from enterprise business architecture issues [8] such as the linking between business model and business process model, we will produce a more requirement to support the development of s. The final result of our research will be uses RUP method and UML for created an overall the model of enterprise architecture for higher education. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This research is supported by grant fund from the DP2M, Directorate General of Higher Education Indonesia. Grant No.269/SP2H/PP/DP2M/IV/2010. Submit Profile Apply Analysis Applicants Apply Status View Status Apply Candidates Head of Department HRM REFERENCES [1] K. M. Babu, S. Aziz and T. Obitz, Infosys Enterprise Architecture Survey 2008, Infosys Technologies Limited, pp Available at: [Accessed: 2 April 2010]. [2] E. Ganesan and R. Paturi, Building Blocks for Enterprise Business Architecture, SETLabs Briefings, Vol 6 No 4, Infosys Technologies Limited, pp Available at: [Accessed: 2 Juni 2010]. Figure 11. Use Case Model of Recruitment Applicants 182

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