Master's Thesis Nevzat ORHAN

Visualization of Enterprise Architecture Model Evolution Based on an Example in the Consumer Goods Industry

Abstract

Enterprise Architecture (EA) Management, started to be a significant management discipline for enterprises with the improvement of IT. Enterprises often seek ways to align enterprise structures and processes with their IT infrastructure in order to have highest productivity and efficiency in their business. EA Management is an ongoing management function to improve Business /IT alignment. In today’s competitive market conditions, enterprises have high pressure to adapt their operations and architecture according to rapidly changing market conditions. Usually, EA Management enables enterprises to adapt their IT to respond for constantly changing market requirements. For decision makers, it is often important to make forecasts and predictions (what-if analysis) about their enterprises or evaluate previous decisions. Today’s model repositories can be utilized to store multiple revisions of an EA model, which builds a starting point to analyze their changes and respective evolution over time. While visual means for comparing EA models would assist decision makers to evaluate future planned-states with respect to their desired target-state of their EA, today’s EA tools lack mechanisms to visualize the evolution of EA models over time.

This thesis work aims to develop mechanisms to visually compare different versions of an EA model. Thereby, we develop and implement concepts of understandable and user- friendly visualizations that can communicate different versions of an EA. Our approaches are evaluated in the German consumer goods industry.

Research question(s)

• What are existing (EA) visualizations that can be employed to communicate temporal aspects of (EA) models?
• Which goals/concerns do stakeholders have using visualizations of an EA model evolution?
• What are stakeholder requirements for visual EA model analysis with respect to temporal aspects?

• How to derive planned-states of an EA in a model repository?
• How to compare planned-states of an EA model with a current-state or a target-state of an EA model.

Expected Outcomes

• Goals and concerns of stakeholders.
• Requirements for a visual presentation of EA model evolution.
• Concepts for taking different versions and visualization of these versions
• Prototypical evaluation of the concepts
• Industry feedback

Related sebis publications

• tear2012 camera ready.pdf Hauder, M., Matthes, F., Roth, S.: Challenges for Automated Enterprise Architecture Documentation. In: 7th International Workshop on Trends in Enterprise Architecture Research (TEAR), Barcelona, Spain, 2012.
• Schaub, M.; Matthes, F.; Roth, S.: Towards a Conceptual Framework for Interactive Enterprise Architecture Management Visualizations. In: Modellierung, Bamberg, Germany, 2012.

• [Ro13b] Roth, S; Matthes, F.: Future Research Topics in Enterprise Architectures Evolution Analysis. In: Design for Future (DFF) Workshop, 2013.

• [Ro13a]  Roth, S; Hauder, M., Farwick, M., Matthes, F., Breu, R.: Enterprise Architecture Documentation: Current Practices and Future Directions, 11th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI), Leipzig, Germany, 2013.
• ##Master's Thesis Philip Achenbach
• ##Bachelor's Thesis Julian Lebherz
• Chair for Informatics 19 (sebis), Technische Universita ̈t Mu ̈nchen. EAM Pattern Cat- alog Wiki. http://eampc-wiki.systemcartography.info (cited 2009-11-06), 2009.