Enterprise Architecture Planning in the Context of Industry 4.0 Transformations.

Industry 4.0 has become an increasing driver of change in the manufacturing industry. However, companies are struggling with the often risky and expensive IT transformation projects that are needed to reach full automation of the sales, production and logistics cycle. We observed a lack of research on the practice of modeling and planning IT transformations towards Industry 4.0. To form the basis of research in this area, we conducted a series of expert interviews on the topic of enterprise architecture transformation planning in the context of Industry 4.0. As a result, we identified several pressing challenges that need to be addressed by organizations to successfully model, plan, and execute such IT transformations. This paper contributes to theory by identifying problems and potential design artifacts that are able to mitigate these problems.