Enterprise Architecture (EA) is slowly becoming an interesting area for organizations in Sweden. IT Governance issues are in reality the most common but through EA they are more easily handled. Today, I would say that about 50% of organizations in Sweden have reached the appropriate level of understanding and maturity and have started to really see the importance of EA. 

At a meeting with the System Landscape Manager of Ericsson Group in March 2005 he clearly stated “I have a problem, I have to go to the USA to meet other people with similar issues and to discuss solutions”. This triggered the idea of a Swedish EA network in my head. I decided to investigate the interest for a network further. The result after a poll with my ten closest IT manager and CIO relations was clearly “This IS very interesting and wanted”. So, some days later SWEAN, the SWedish Enterprise Architecture Network, was born.

The first seminar was held in April with DYA as the main subject. It was a two day session with individual target groups. The first day was for large companies and the second for smaller. Martin van den Berg flew in from the Netherlands to perform the sessions. Fully 20 people participated each day.
The participant’s appreciation was high, so they decided immediately that we should continue.

The second seminar was held in October and was divided into three days with three different issues: EA Tools & Integration; Transformation and EA/IT Governance.
With about 30 participants each day this was another success.

The participants stated during discussions in the second workshop that the DYA mindset would form the common platform of SWEAN. 

The next seminar is the 31st of January with IT Governance as the subject. Menno van Doorn and Michiel Boreel from ViNT will run a seminar around their book “Making IT Governance work in a Sarbanes-Oxley world”.

To understand the scope of SWEAN, see the following numbers:

• SWEAN has 233 stakeholders today, of whom 130 are primary. 
• The stakeholders represent about 150 organizations in all sizes and from all types of sectors. Global companies like IKEA, Ericsson, Sandvik, SCA, Skanska, Volvo, Saab, AstraZeneca and Outokumpu are represented as well as the large banks and insurance companies. 
• SWEAN is an independent network with Sogeti as the co-coordinating and administrative sponsor. 
• SWEAN will live as long as the stakeholders perceive it to be worthwhile.    

Architecture at IKEA

IKEA has gone through a large re-organization due to the fast growth of the company. Before that re-organization took off, Sogeti was awarded an Architecture assignment. The content was two-fold: to present DYA and to perform requirements analysis for EMR, Enterprise Metadata Repository. The EMR case ended up in a RFP document and a procurement plan while DYA actually was selected as the model for the architecture work. 
Today, after the re-organization, they continue to work with DYA as the working model. 
IKEA today uses the DYA definition of EA as their own. 

Per Björkegren