Master's Thesis Mariana Mykhashchuk

Complexity of today’s information technology (IT) together with its ubiquity and continuously growing role in enterprise arouse enormous interest in approaches meant for managing business and IT as a whole. A commonly accepted means to enhance the alignment between business and IT by means of providing the holistic view on the organization is enterprise architecture (EA) management, which guides and supports companies in transformations within a rapidly changing environment. Despite the plurality of available publications and research initiatives in this field, the topic of EA management is still faced with a challenging lack of standardization, as no common understanding of what EA management really is has yet developed. To deal with aforementioned issue, the chair of Software Engineering for Business Information Systems of the Technische Universität München developed the configurable Building Blocks for Enterprise Architecture Management Solutions (BEAMS) approach, which represents a collection of best-practice solutions for recurring EA management problems and provides a practical guidance for organizations to design an organization-specific EA management function. Nevertheless, the BEAMS approach is still relatively young and its thorough evaluation has not been undertaken.
In the course of this master’s thesis, an applicability evaluation of the BEAMS visual aspect is performed by decomposing viewpoints, collected from theory and practice, in modular components, which are further compared with viewpoint building blocks available in the BEAMS collection. Gaps detected during the applicability evaluation phase are subsequently used as a basis for extending the viewpoint building blocks of BEAMS with new candidates.