Engaging a Moving Organisation - Modelling a military enterprise with architecture tools

Transformations of military enterprises seek to use technology to gain better performance, provide more effective outcomes, and excel in the space and time of confrontation. Enterprise Architecture should provide methods and competencies to gain more understanding of transformations and improve the success of these journeys. However, military transformations have a record of a variety of challenges and often fail to deliver intended outcomes. Possibly, the enterprise architecture practitioners are trying to engage a moving target. The failures do not notably follow any exact pattern or line of correlation. Still, they seem to be distributed through the layers of the military structure. Despite the evident problem and risk to national security, there is a surprising lack of research in this field. The dissertation approaches the challenges in military transformations from an enterprise architecture view in a quest to find models that would better explain the interrelationships between the military environment, affairs, knowledge, information, and technology over time—in other words, trying to engage an evolutionary enterprise and see where it may be going. The dissertation approaches the problem from a pragmatic view using a design science approach to create a better tool in modelling the dynamics and evolution of the military enterprise. Since the components and layers of an enterprise follow a different logic, the design needs to apply transdisciplinary research methods appropriate to each layer of the enterprise system. The proposed EA tool improves the quality of an enterprise architect's analysis of military transformations in recognising the current situation, seeing the paths of evolution leading to the current position, and foreseeing both the challenges and opportunities in journeys towards the strategic end state. Furthermore, the EA tool reveals some of the hidden forces driving or hindering the change of an enterprise, and therefore improving the success of digital transformation in the military context. The military decision making may benefit from the improved architectural insight and foresight when defining national-level strategies, implementing changes, maintaining operational capabilities, and, lately, obtaining the most out of their digital transformations.