EAMML

Todays 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.

Reflecting the aforementioned importance of EA management a plurality of approaches for establishing an EA management function in an enterprise have been proposed by researchers, practitioners, and standardization bodies. The approaches vary widely in respect to the proposed methods, models, and languages. The objective of the guided research is to analyze prominent approaches for EA management in respect to the proposed method for the design of an enterprise-specific EA management function.

In the guided research we will develop an analysis framework, based on existing publications on EA management approaches. Input for this analysis framework might be the main activities of the EA management function as proposed in the Enterprise Architecture Management Method Library (EAMML) (see [Bu09]) and existing classification approaches (e.g. [Le07,Fr09]). The framework will be used to analyze prominent EA management approaches. Finally, we will discuss the analysis results and provide hints for further areas of research in the context of a reference method for designing an enterprise-specific EA management function.

• [Bu09]    Buckl, S.; Matthes, F.; Schweda, C. M.: The Enterprise Architecture Management Method Library. Technical Report, Technische Universität München, München, Germany, 2009 (in publication).
• [Le07]    Leitel, J.: Entwicklung und Anwendung eines Klassifikationssystems für Enterprise Architecture Frameworks. Master Thesis, Technische Universität München, München, Germany, 2007.
• [Fr09]    Franke, U.; Höök, D.; König, J.; Lagerström, R.; Närman, P.; Ullberg, J.; Gustafsson, P.; Ekstedt, M.: EAF2- A Framework for Categorizing Enterprise Architecture Frameworks. In: 1st International Workshop on Enterprise Architecture Challenges and Responses (WEACR 2009), IEEE Computer Society, 2009.