EAMML

Today's enterprises are faced by the challenge of an ever changing environment, which they continuously have to adapt to. Reasons for this ongoing change are among others globalized markets, specialized customer demands, shorter time to markets, and emerging legal regulations. A commonly accepted means to support an enterprise in the transformation process and furthermore enhance the alignment between business and IT is enterprise architecture (EA) management, which provides a holistic perspective on the enterprise ranging from strategies and goals via business processes to application and IT infrastructure aspects. In order to support an enterprise in the transformation process, EA management creates architectural descriptions of current, planned, and future states of the enterprise.

The objective of this guided research is to develop an enterprise-specific process for the documentation and maintenance of architectural descriptions for the partnering company. Therefore, we will on the one hand identify relevant artifacts, e.g. business processes, application systems, infrastructure elements and their relationships to be documented. On the other hand existing documentation and data sources, e.g. configuration management data bases, application lists, or inventories, will be investigated by us regarding their potential for reusability of the contained information. Based on the identified sources, we want to develop a process for architecture documentation and maintenance, which ensures that the gathered information and developed documentation is kept up to date. Therefore, we will analyze approaches as proposed in literature (cf. [Mo09, Ai09]) and best practice patterns (cf. [se09]) regarding their suitability for the partnering company. Finally, as a result of the guided research project, we will develop ideas, how the documentation and maintenance process for EA can be extended to support different analyses of the current architectural description.

• [Ai09]    Aier, S.; Buckl, S.; Franke, U.; Gleichauf, B.; Johnson, P.; Närman, P.; Schweda, C.M.; Ullberg, J.: A Survival Analysis of Application Life Spans based on Enterprise Architecture Models. In: 3rd International Workshop on Enterprise Modelling and Information Systems Architectures, Ulm, Germany, 2009.
• [Mo09]    Moser, C.; Junginger, S.; Brückmann, M.; Schöne, K.-M.: Some Process Patterns for Enterprise Architecture Management. In: Proceedings, Workshop on Patterns in Enterprise Architecture Management (PEAM2009), Kaiserslautern, Germany, 2009.
• [se09]    Lehrtuhl für Software Engineering betrieblicher Informationssysteme (sebis): Enterprise Architecture Management Pattern Catalog Wiki. http://eampc-wiki.systemcartography.info (cited 2009-10-21), 2009.