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Ro13d - Empowering Business Users to Analyze Enterprise Architectures - Structural Model Matching to Configure Visualizations

Last modified Nov 1, 2013

Abstract

Visualizations are common means to analyze Enterprise Architecture (EA) models in order to support decision makers with relevant information on organizational processes, information systems, infrastructure, and their interconnections. These visualizations typically include viewpoints that are tailored to the specific information demand of stakeholders. Currently, creating viewpoints requires experts with a strong technical background due to complex configurations and inflexible tool solutions. However, often stakeholder concerns and questions arise spontaneously. Hence, visualizations that can be generated without expert knowledge would enable business users to perform ad hoc analyses of an EA information model. To overcome this challenge, we propose a solution which facilitates analyses of arbitrary EA information models by non-technical stakeholders. Our approach is based on ad hoc configurable visualizations. Since business users often lack technical expertise, we introduce a user-friendly wizard that lowers the barrier for the creation of viewpoints. The wizard is based on structural pattern matching of models. Key to our approach are abstract viewpoints that model best-practice knowledge of EA visualizations and abstract view models which model the information demand of abstract viewpoints. Our contributions are 1) a meta-information model capturing both the technical information demand of an abstract viewpoint and the information offer of an EA information model, 2) a pattern matching algorithm calculating feasible configurations for bindings of visualizations to information, and 3) a wizard to support non-technical stakeholders with generation of these visualizations. We present an implementation of our approach and show user interface details of the wizard. The wizard recommends feasible configurations automatically in order to unburden the configuration process for non-technical stakeholders. 

Files and Subpages

Name Type Size Last Modification Last Editor
Re13d.pdf 758 KB 01.11.2013