Alexander Rossmann, Alfred Zimmermann (eds.

): Digital Enterprise Computing 2017

Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI), Gesellschaft für Informatik, Bonn 2017 49

Digital Transformation in Higher Education – The Role of

Enterprise Architectures and Portals

Kurt Sandkuhl 1, Holger Lehmann 2

Abstract: Digital transformation is considered as one of the mega-trends in industry and the
public sector. One of the sectors with potential for digital transformation is higher education in
universities and university colleges. Many universities and schools developed digitization
strategies and new kinds of offerings for their traditional target groups and for new, non-traditional
target groups. However, digitization and digital strategies often are limited to digitizing the content
of lectures and to opening access to education modules by offering them online. We argue that
digitization strategies should include a wider focus and propose that enterprise architecture
management could provide an important contribution in structuring digitization efforts and that
enterprise or knowledge portals could play a role for implementing the strategies.
Keywords: Digital transformation, higher education, enterprise architecture, portal.

1 Introduction
Digital transformation is considered as one of the mega-trends in industry and the public
sector. In general, digital transformation describes the shift from traditional (often
physical) creation and delivery of customer value, including the operational procedures
related to this, into the massive use of digital technologies which enhance or replace the
traditional product or services with digitized ones. According to a white paper of the
World Economic Forum [WEF16] digital transformation offers a huge potential of
innovation in the magnitude of several trillion US$ and addresses industries (e.g.
logistics, healthcare, automotive) and public sector applications (e.g. healthcare,
government). One of the sectors with potential for digital transformation is higher
education in university and university colleges. Many universities and schools developed
digitization strategies and new kinds of offerings for their traditional target groups and
for new, non-traditional target groups. However, digitization and digital strategies often
are limited to digitizing the content of lectures and to opening access to education
modules by offering them online. We argue that digitization strategies should include a
wider focus and propose that enterprise architecture management could provide an
important contribution in structuring digitization efforts and that enterprise or knowledge
portals could play a role for implementing the strategies concerning educational services.

1
University of Rostock, Institute of Computer Science, Albert-Einstein-Str. 22, 18057 Rostock, Germany,
[email protected]
2
University of Rostock, Institute of Computer Science, Albert-Einstein-Str. 22, 18057 Rostock, Germany,
[email protected]
50 Kurt Sandkuhl and Holger Lehmann

The paper follows an explorative research approach by combining theories and findings
from various sectors of research and applying them in higher education. Most of the
work presented is based on an argumentative-deductive research approach. A case study
from Rostock University serves as basis for illustrating the proposals and validating
ideas.
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents the background
for the research work from enterprise architecture management and portals. Section 3
discusses digital transformation in higher education and presents possible transformation
strategies. Section 4 shows examples for using these strategies from a real world
example using enter prise architectures as guiding means. Section 5 discusses the
use of enterprise portals for strategy implementation. Section 6 summarizes findings and
discusses future work.

2 Background
This section summarizes relevant background for our work from enterprise architecture
management (section 2.1) and enterprise and knowledge portals (section 2.2).

2.1 Enterprise Architecture Management

In general, an EA captures and structures all relevant components for describing an

enterprise, including the processes used for development of the EA as such [Ah12].
Research activities in EAM are manifold. The literature analysis included in [WK15]
shows that elements of EAM [Bu10], process and principles [Jo04], and implementation
drivers and strategies [Sa15] are among the frequently researched subjects. Furthermore
there is work on architecture analysis [Jo07], decision making based on architectures
[Jo04 and IT governance [Si10]. However, there is no specific focus on the integration of
product-IT and EAM.
Of specific relevance for digital transformation are EAM frameworks identifying
structures and dependencies in EA. In this context, TOGAF [TOG11] is considered by
many researchers as industry standard and defines three different architectural levels
which are visible in many other frameworks: The Business Architecture defines the
business strategy, governance, organization and key business processes. The Information
Architecture is divided into two sub-layers: Data Architecture and Application
Architecture. The Data Architecture describes the structure of an organization's logical
and physical data assets and data management resources. Its objective is to define the
major types of data, necessary to support the business. Data Architecture is also called
Information Architecture. The Application Architecture provides a blueprint for the
individual application systems to be deployed, for their interactions and their
relationships to the core business processes of an organization. The Technology
Architecture describes the physical realization of an architectural solution. The logical
 Digital Transformation in Higher Education 51

software and hardware capabilities, which are required to support the deployment of
business, data, and application services, are also defined in this dimension [TOG11].
ArchiMate [TOG12] is a notation for modelling TOGAF.

2.2 Portals

A portal allows access to consistently integrate heterogeneous applications or data

sources [DG02] and generally describes a Web application in which contents, services
and functions are integrated [CC02]. Enterprise portals provide the user with
personalized internal and external corporate information as the basis for business
decisions [ST98]. In addition to the employees of the enterprise the customers and
business partners are increasingly explicitly included in the portal. Community Portals
address the need to structure and further develop contents that are available on the
Internet for specific areas of interest. These interest communities are not based on any
formal membership and are largely self-organizing. Examples are Community Web
Portals [Sta00] and portals for Communities of Practice [Tur99].

A further group of portal terms results from using the portal contents and their
structuring. Information portals provide the access to high quality information for
particular target groups [Ag03]. The term Semantic Portal is usually used when
formalized conceptual models, such as ontologies and related technologies of the
Semantic Web are applied to support, for example, restructuring, presentation and
navigation in portal contents. Organisational Memory Systems are IT systems that
implement the knowledge base of an organisation while simultaneously supporting the
use of the knowledge base [Leh98]. Knowledge portals [Sa05 ] are therefore to be
regarded as Organisational Memory Systems provided individualization and process
support are focused on organizational matters.

3 Digital Transformation in Higher Education

Our approach to analyse possible digital transformation paths in higher education is
based on a general digital transformation model which is presented in section 3.1.
Section 3.2 applies this general model and elaborates selected general digital
transformation paths in higher education. Section 3.3 investigates which enterprise
architecture layers are affected by the different approaches in order to identify tasks to be
tackled in enterprise architecture management.

3.1 Digital Transformation

In many industrial domains, products and services traditionally are delivered based on
physical infrastructures (e.g. shops, bank offices, service centres) or persons (e.g. sales
agent, broker). Often, also the products are physical ones and the operational processes
52 Kurt Sandkuhl and Holger Lehmann

are using physical support. Customers in many of these domains increasingly expect that
apps, mobile services or services accompanying the products offer additional value for
them, i.e. the providers of products or services have to decide how to improve the overall
customer experience or their products. In this context, digital transformation describes
the shift from traditional (often physical) creation and delivery of customer value,
including the operational procedures related to this, into the use of digital technologies
with the aim to enhance or replace the traditional product or services with digitized ones.
In order to further investigate the digital transformation, we used a structural approach
for analyzing digitization paths proposed in [BB11]. This approach considers two
dimensions of potential digitization, the digitization of the product offered by a company
and the digitization of the operational procedures for offering these products. In both
dimensions, three steps are distinguished (see figure 1 a).
In the product dimension, these steps are to enhance (add complementary services to a
product), extend (new product features by using digital components) or redefine products
(newly designed products replacing the earlier generations). In the procedure dimension,
the steps are create (new and IT-based operating capabilities), leverage (the new
capabilities for more efficient procedures) and integrate (more efficient and traditional
procedures).

Fig. 1: Dimensions of the Digital Transformation approach [BB11]

 Digital Transformation in Higher Education 53

3.2 Digital Transformation Paths in Higher Education

Assuming that the overall objective of digital transformation in higher education is to

achieve a redefinition of education services and accompanying re-development of
operational processes, there are at least three different possible paths which have to be
considered:

• Service-first transformation focusing on a change and redefinition of services

before addressing major improvements and changes in operations.
• Operation-first transformation aiming at new and improved digital internal
processes as a basis for later redefinition of services.
• Service – operation combination attempting an integrated transformation of both
aspects.
Operation-first would basically require a digitization of all value creation and most
supporting services. Value creation in higher education is everything related to the
education process of students from admission, registration for programs and courses,
examination in courses, the development of programs and their quality assurance, etc.
Supporting services include facility management, study planning, scheduling, teacher
allocation and much more. All in all this basically requires an integrated campus
management functionality including support for mobile workers and for knowledge
management.
Service-first would have to focus on creating new education products and transforming
existing products into digital ones. One aspect of this activity is opening established
education programmes for access from outside the higher education institution on
national and international level. This is usually connected to making the content of the
education digital and to also providing digital means for student – teacher and student –
student interaction and collaboration. Internationalization also requires adaptations
regarding the applied language. Furthermore, most traditional education programmes
need to be decomposed into a smaller level of granularity, e.g. instead of three year study
programmes into shorter certificate courses and instead of 6 ECTS teaching modules into
smaller but combinable modules. Such decomposition would support to offer them for a
wider target group and increase flexibility.
Service and operation combination would be a systematic inter-relation of both
approaches presented before. This could, for example, be a new study format for a new
target group of the university in combination with digitization of the operational
processes related to the new study format and target group. Many of such combination
paths result from pilot project for implementing digitization of higher education.
54 Kurt Sandkuhl and Holger Lehmann

4 Enterprise Architecture and Portals supporting Digital

Transformation in Higher Education
This section focuses on a discussion about the role of enterprise architectures and portals
in implementing digital transformation. For this purpose, section 4.1 uses an excerpt
from the enterprise architecture of Rostock University, which serves as an illustrative
case for this paper, and section 4.2 presents experiences regarding required changes in
this enterprise architecture and the role of portals.

4.1 Enterprise Architecture – An example from Rostock University

The concept of enterprise architectures in general and the TOGAF as a standard in the
field were briefly introduced in section 2.1. In this section, we structure our discussion
about the effects of different digital transformation paths (as presented in section 3) on
the organization by considering the different enterprise architecture layers according to
TOGAF. As a means to illustrate our view, we use an excerpt of the enterprise
architecture of Rostock University. This excerpt originates from earlier work in
published in a capability management project [Pi13], campus management and an e-
learning project [Sa15].
The current situation of the enterprise architecture at Rostock University can be
summarized as follows:

• Business architecture: established catalogue of administrative services for

internal research and teaching, human resource management, facility and other
supporting services. Coverage of all student lifecycle phases in business
processes (from application to issuing exit certificates). Bachelor, Master, and
PhD program development and delivery at the facilities of Rostock University.

• Application architecture: various information systems providing support for

certain functionalities in administrative and supporting services. Partly
integrated systems for managing student lifecycle and for planning and
operating study programmes. Learning management and training software
modules. Multitude of specialized application for specific faculties of the
university. Various literature databases and library systems.

• Data architecture: no enterprise-wide data model but functionally integrated

data models and exchange possibilities (e.g. for student lifecycle management,
for administrative purposes, for facility planning, etc.). Teaching content
captured digitally but often not integrated with administrative data.

• Technology architecture: central IT-infrastructure for the university with

additional decentral environments for some faculties and research units.
 Digital Transformation in Higher Education 55

4.2 Digital Transformation Paths in Higher Education

In the service-first strategy the most severe changes have to be performed in the
application architecture as new platforms for delivery of innovative education products
or services have to be implemented. This could, for example, be MOOC platforms or
support for collaborative learning and peer learning in distributed student groups who
cannot attend on-campus teaching modules but are geographically distributed. The
business architecture also will be affected of service-first transformation paths as online
examination procedures and modified workflows for issuing certificates or arranging on-
site modules might be needed. However, most of the traditional campus management
functionality should stay stable. In the data architecture, one of the important changes is
the more intense use of digital content and the integration of different media types with
administrative course and student data.
In the process-first transformation path, digitization of all value creation and supporting
processes is in focus, which from an enterprise architecture perspective affects the
business architecture most and – for alignment of business and IT – also the application
architecture. In the business architecture, the implementation of digital processes and
their optimization usually is only one aspect to be tackled. Equally important is the
adaptation or organisational structures to changed processes and the creation of new
organisational functions, e.g. an organisation unit for online education programmes or
certificates. In the data layer, a better integration of data models of the information
systems supporting operative processes is required.
For the combined service / process transformation paths, the above changes and
adaptations in service-first and process-first transformation paths also have to be
performed but this usually is performed with focus on single departments or a clearly
defined organizational scope. An example would be to start with digital transformation
in all education programmes outside the traditional Bachelor/Master system and continue
with internationally oriented programmes. It can be noted that in all three transformation
paths all architecture layers are affected.

5 Portals as a Support for Strategy Implementation

The focus of Rostock University’s digital transformation strategy currently is on the
education programmes and services offered, i.e. the strategy can be as “service-first”. In
2015, the university decided to create online courses based on MOOCs and new
certificate programmes for non-traditional target groups. The project KOSMOS supports
the implementation of these new services. KOSMOS aims at attracting new target
groups to university education and to develop and explore new study formats. New
target groups are, for example, experienced job professionals who completed their higher
education long ago, or practitioners without a sufficient level of formal qualification but
much experience from practice. New study formats are, for example, short study
programmes (6 months or one year) for mixed target groups and a combination of on-
56 Kurt Sandkuhl and Holger Lehmann

campus and online teaching.

In KOSMOS it became clear that a portal for teaching and learning could serve as an
integration point to implement the strategy. New target groups and formats need an
adjusted or different kind of support by learning management systems compared to the
traditional target groups, since didactic and pedagogical concepts also differ. In order to
facilitate this adaptivity requirement, the approach is that learning management systems
(LMS) should be flexibly adaptable to the learner’s individual demands when it comes to
contents and applications supporting the learning process. In KOSMOS, this LMS is a
portal integrating existing and future learning objects and tools supporting the different
learning phases. This portal is called “MyKosmos”.
The MyKosmos portal integrates different functionalities and applications into a single
user interface. Examples are:

• Meta-search engine: one element of the integration is to provide a single user

interface to searching several literature database and research information
systems. Based on the student profile (i.e. the study format, current integration
into working groups and personal background), the meta.search is configured to
search with priority in those database assumed to be the most important ones
for the task at hand.

• Integration of learning management systems: Rostock University has a learning

management system for supporting teaching in different courses (Stud.IP3), for
interactive content and learning objects (ILIAS4) and for scheduling education
and providing individual information (LSF5). These systems are integrated into
the MyKosmos portal provided a joint view on relevant data.

• Collaborative work of distributed student groups is supported by integrating

synchronous (Skype6) and asynchronous communication, document sharing,
joint editing of documents and awareness functions for group work.

• Program managers and course responsible persons (teachers) may integrate

additional functionality into the portal by using the “portlet” concept of the
Liferay platform which forms the basis for MyKosmos.
The above summary shows that MyKosmos is contributing to the integration of various
applications which in turn is part of the digital transformation activity. Furthermore, the
portal also contributed to ´development of more synchronized work flows as the portal
development was prepared by business process integration activities. More concrete, we
modelled all future usage scenarios for the portal and derived integration needs on
process and application level from the scenario models. For this purpose we used an
3
http://www.studip.de/
4
http://www.ilias.de
5
https://www.his.de/produkte/sva-fsv-gx-campus/lehre-studium-forschung.html
6
https://www.skype.com
 Digital Transformation in Higher Education 57

approach from enterprise modelling based on Troux Architect as a tool and Troux
Semantics as notation. We modelled the different planned ways how MyKosmos would
be used by the future users. This resulted in process model-like scenarios, as depicted in
Figure 2 showing the example “distributed study formats: assignment work”.

Fig. 2: Process model (excerpt) for new study format

The scenario starts with the student logging in. According to his profile he is provided
with an individually configured entry page, making offers for his learning process.
Following his course of study, completing different modules within the study format, the
student choses to open or proceed with his assignment work for a certain module, which
is loaded presenting the recent state of his work in progress. Once having caught up with
his recent results, the student is confronted with different tasks to be fulfilled in order to
fulfil the assignment, however is free to choose which task to pick. A regular assignment
the designed study formats includes information research the portal supports providing
the appropriate sources for the study format. In addition many assignments also involve
the communication with fellow students since they are assigned group work. In the
process the work should be documented to be handed in, where the kind of
documentation being determined in the assignment description.
During the work process coordination issues between the team members should be
resolved as well, which might be due to the individual time tables and working hours, as
well as the specific interests or responsibilities within the task assignment. At the end of
each session the user has the choice between submitting his work for the correction
process and simply closing it to proceed in another sessions.
58 Kurt Sandkuhl and Holger Lehmann

6 Summary
The paper investigated digital transformation from the perspective of higher education
organizations and investigated general transformations paths and their implementation.
We argue that enterprise architectures form an excellent support for planning the
transformation and that portals are a suitable support for implementing the
transformation. This statement is supported by experiences from Rostock University and
the development and use of the MyKosmos portal.
The limitation of this work is that the digital transformation paths should be described in
much more detail and investigated in many more case. A description in much more
detail should include the objectives and steps of transformation activities and an analysis
of all enterprise architecture layers including visualisation of effects of these digital
transformation steps across all layers. The dependency on only a single case of
transformation should be remedied by involving other higher education organizations
also. This is at the same time the most important future work in the field.

Acknowledgements
The work presented in this paper was supported by the project KOSMOS-2
(Konstruktion und Organisation eines Studiums in Offenen Systemen) funded by the
BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany) and the European Social
Funds of the European Union.

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