A guide for enterprise-specific design of EA models

Abstract

Prevalent EAM-Frameworks, as analyzed in [BS11], usually acknowledge the need to adapt the EA model to the company’s concerns. But when it comes to actual adaptation methods, the provided descriptions are often abstract, focusing on deliverables instead of defining the process in detail (see the analyses in [BS11]). The Building Blocks for EA Management Solutions (BEAMS) developed at TU München are a notable exception from this schema (see [Bu10] and [Sc11a]). BEAMS provides a general adaptation method for EA models; this method grounds in an organized library of best-practice building blocks derived from a research project at TU München.

More coarse-grained “use cases” for EAM, relating to particular stakeholders and organizational maturity, are described in [Ha13]. The therein presented best-practices are based on the experience gained in consulting projects, and are applied in such projects to deliver organization-specific EAM-Frameworks, encompassing a tailored EA model. The adaptation method presented in [Ha13] is general, too, but also abstract, and heavily depends on the experience of the responsible consultant.

In this work, we further and apply the central idea behind BEAMS and extend the conceptual model of BEAMS’ organized library, towards more coarse-grained concepts like “use cases”, as described by [Ha13] and related work. This provides the foundation to refine the general information model configuration process from [Ha13] into an adaptation method, which combines best-practice solutions with a rigorous perspective on EA models.

In particular, we develop four major artifacts in this work:

• Firstly, we derive a conceptual model covering the use cases and contingency factors for EA Models as described by [Ha13]
• Secondly, we collect a catalogue of instances of these concepts, containing detailed information about relationships among one another.
• Thirdly, we design a design method that is able to transform stakeholders’ use-cases and contingency factors into an enterprise-specific EA information model.
• Lastly, we describe a knowledge management approach, enabling the introduction and permanent advancement of the knowledge base, as encompassed within the adaptation method.

In order to realize these artifacts, we start by revisiting literature. In a first step, we identify and systematically describe all concepts as defined by [Ha13] or related work. Secondly, we derive the appropriate context of these concepts, modeling their relationships and thereby deriving the conceptual model. In addition, occurrences of the described concepts are collected in a third step, by simultaneously identifying any correlations and dependencies among these elements. Based on these findings, we derive an adaptation method, proposing a process for eliciting EA-Modeling requirements, and how to translate these requirements into an enterprise-specific EA model. After that, we evaluate different forms of knowledge representations, resulting in a proposed knowledge management approach, ensuring accessibility and extensibility of the knowledge for EA consultants at iteratec GmbH.

Literatur