Industry 4.0 Impact Propagation on Enterprise Architecture Models

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) brings a new revolution into the enterprises world, but this phenomenon is larger and covers organizations of different kinds: governmental, educational, cultural, healthcare, and other institutions. Enterprise Architecture (EA) provides a whole vision, using sets of models or blueprints, of an organization along with its information technologies, business processes and strategies. Many research and practical works are made to clarify the I4.0 impact on organizations or to guide EA practitioners through the transformation process that allows them to maintain the organizational alignment, performance, and competitiveness. However, in the reviewed literature we have not identified any conceptual work describing the I4.0 impact on enterprise architectures models. In this paper, we present an approach of propagation of I4.0 impacts through EA models. Our proposal includes an Industry 4.0 Impact Propagation Model and a process to apply it. In order to evaluate the completeness of the model and test the process, we applied it to one of the most known EA frameworks TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework). We use the extended conceptual model of TOGAF version 9.2 to detail what would be the direct impact of an I4.0 transformation and how it can be propagated to identify all elements of EA models which should be adapted following the introduction of an I4.0 component into an organization. We discuss the results of this evaluation.