Reviewing the state-of-the-art in EA-related questions

EAs form highly complex and intervowen structures whose management is an issue of enduring interest from both researchers and practitioners. With the prevalence of quantitative analyses as means to support decision making in management disciplines not only recently more and more EA metrics are proposed in EA management approaches from literature. These metrics are grounded in corresponding conceptualizations of the EA or, more precisely, parts thereof. Complementary, the conceptualizations are described via EA description languages and their underlying information models, respectively.

The building-blocks for EA management solutions (BEAMS) provide re-usable information model building-blocks (IBBs) that can be used to describe an organization-specific EA information model. Due to a richer meta-language for describing information models the IBBs take a generalized and abstracted perspective on information modeling, e.g. can "refactor" cross-cutting concerns to mixin-types that reify EA-related questions, which further denote the corresponding metrics that are necessary for answering.

Based on this understanding of information models and the generalized perspective taken by the IBBs it remains to be answered, if BEAMS yet covers or is conceptually suitable for covering the state-of-the-art in EA metrics. This guided research analyzes the aforementioned coverage as described in approaches from literature against the conceptual background provided by the IBBs and their underlying meta-model. In detail this means that

1. well-known EA management approaches should be revisited in respect to the metrics and questions described therein,
2. formal representations of information models underlying the metrics and questions should be elicited,
3. correspondences between the elicited information models and the IBBs from BEAMS are analyzed, and
4. additional IBBs for BEAMS addressing identified "white-spots" are proposed.