Best Practices for Business and Systems Analysis in Projects Conforming to Enterprise Architecture

This paper aims to identify best practices for performing business and systems analysis in projects that are required to comply with Enterprise Architecture. We apply two qualitative research methods to study real-life projects conforming to architecture at Statistics Netherlands. First, a Canonical Action Research approach is applied to participate in two business process redesign projects. Second, we use Focus Group interviews to elicit knowledge about carrying out projects conforming to architecture. Based on this empirical research we present seven observations and ten best practices. The best practices point to the fact that project conformance is not only the responsibility of project members, but also of enterprise architects. Considering four levels of best practices (good idea, good practice, local best practice, industry best practice), we argue that our guidelines are located at the second (good practice) level. More research is required to prove or falsify them in other settings.