BS11 - On the State-of-the-Art in Enterprise Architecture Management...

Abstract

The enterprise architecture (EA) and its management are topics receiving ongoing interest from academia, practitioners, standardization bodies, and tool vendors. Over the last decade and especially in the last five years, much has been said and written on these topics that nevertheless have a much longer history dating back to the nineties of the last century. In these days, John Zachman was one of the first to understand the ‘bigger whole’ in which IS architecting and IS development is embedded. Ever since these days, the canonic knowledge on this topic, which would later become known as “EA management”, has been furthered by many contributors originating from different philosophical, educational, and theoretical backgrounds, leading to numerous presentations and publications in this area. But while each article, paper or book extends the body of knowledge, it also ‘raises the stakes’ for anyone willing to enter this field of engagement. Especially, young researchers novel to this area that is not covered that much in university education than it perhaps should, find themselves confronted with a vast amount of ‘hits’, when they enter “EA management” as keyword in their favorite (scientific) search engine.

This report aims at charting the landscape of EA management research and practice. Applying a generic framework for structuring the body of knowledge in the field into the two core areas of “method” and “language”, the work provides an overview on the state-of-the-art in the field, delineates interesting questions for future research, and shows how different approaches taken may be worthwhile subjects for researching how they may complement each other. Notwithstanding,  subsequent work does not claim to cover all what has ever been written on the subject, but covers 22 different approaches from EA management communities from
academic and industry based on over 150 sources ranging from technical reports to journal articles, from workshop papers to monographs. Dealing with each of the approaches not only on an abstract level but classifying it with a generic framework of the field and giving a summary of the approach’s key achievements, the work provides a viewpoint balancing depth and breadth of the investigation.