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Enterprise Architecture At American Express

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Enterprise Architecture At American Express
Enterprise Architecture at American Express

Critical facts
American Express, located in New York City, was founded in 1850 (Corporate Profile, 2015).
It is one of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (Corporate Profile, 2015).
American provides services such as credit cards, charge cards, and traveler’s checks (Corporate Profile, 2015).
American Express cards account for 24% of credit card transactions in the U.S. (Corporate Profile, 2015).
According to the company’s 10k, the company generates $33 billion in revenue and over $5 billion in income. The company’s total assets are over $150 billion.
American Express has one of the largest IT infrastructures and is able to handle an extremely high number of transactions each second (Demirkan, 2006).
In 2011, the company won the first annual InfoWorld/Forrester Enterprise Architecture Award for its EA initiatives (Knorr, 2011).
American Express chose to use an Enterprise Architecture (EA) as their IT framework that aligned their business and organizational needs to their information technology.
Enterprise architects were the employees responsible for using this framework to continuously make their processes more efficient and utilizing their IT/IS to the fullest extent (Pearlson and Sanders, 2013).
Analysis
I will be analyzing the success of American Express’s Enterprise Architecture, how Zachman Framework is used to structure the EA, and how this improved their existing service-oriented architecture (SOA). Changes in the way that mobile payments were being used by their clients, the company had to be flexible and adapt to the transformation. New delivery channels required American Express to adjust their prior time-to-market guidelines for payment services (Pearlson and Sanders, 2013). The company turned to its Enterprise Architecture (EA) to guide them through the current market conditions.

The opportunity that American Express saw was to use EA to meet the demands for a hastily changing



References: Choi, J., Nazareth, D. L., & Jain, H. K. (2010). Implementing Service-Oriented Architecture in Organizations. Journal Of Management Information Systems, 26(4), 253-286. Corporate Profile. (2015, January 1). Retrieved February 22, 2015, from http://ir.americanexpress.com/CorporateProfile.aspx?iid=102700 Demirkan, H., & Goul, M. (2006). AMCIS 2006 PANEL SUMMARY: TOWARDS THE SERVICE ORIENTED ENTERPRISE VISION: BRIDGING INDUSTRY AND ACADEMICS.Communications Of The Association For Information Systems, 18546-556. Knor, E. (2011, September 19). The 2011 Enterprise Architecture Awards. Retrieved February 22, 2015, from http://www.infoworld.com/article/2619868/enterprise-architecture/enterprise-architecture-the-2011-enterprise-architecture-awards.html Löhe, J., & Legner, C. (2014). Overcoming implementation challenges in enterprise architecture management: a design theory for architecture-driven IT Management (ADRIMA). Information Systems & E-Business Management, 12(1), 101-137. doi:10.1007/s10257-012-0211-y Nogueira, J. M., Romero, D., Espadas, J., & Molina, A. (2013). Leveraging the Zachman framework implementation using action – research methodology – a case study: aligning the enterprise architecture and the business goals. Enterprise Information Systems, 7(1), 100-132. doi:10.1080/17517575.2012.678387 Pearlson, K. (2001). Organizational Strategy and Information Systems. In Managing and using information systems: A strategic approach. New York: J. Wiley & Sons. Pereira, C. M., & Sousa, P. (2004). A method to define an enterprise architecture using the zachman frameworkdoi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/967900.968175

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