Enterprise architecture (EA) management represents a commonly accepted instrument to guide and increase the mutual alignment of business and IT. The rising demand for enterprises to quickly adapt to changing market situations and to flexibly reorganize their IT in order to enable innovative business capabilities calls for an integrated and holistic management perspective. This holistic point of view is even more important in presence of the heterogeneous structures of the historically grown IT-landscapes. The sheer number of relevant elements, i.e. business processes, geographically dispersed application systems, or infrastructure elements, to be documented, planned, and controlled - in short that constitute the subject of management - demands for a tool support.
An organization willing to introduce such a tool is confronted with a plethora of different tools in a still growing market, whose vendors claim to provide the 'best' solution. As the decision for a specific EA management tool represents a long-term investment, it should be based on a solid understanding of what the tool currently supports as well as its envisioned functionality and the way this development fits in the company’s own strategy. While multiple surveys target the capabilities and functionalities currently provided by the tools, information on the vendor's roadmap is scarcer. Moreover, little literature is yet available on practice-relevant emerging trends in EA management that could serve as reference point for assessing the tool vendor's 'completeness of vision'.
This is the research gap that this survey seeks to close. Its objective is to identify relevant business- and IT-related trends which can be addressed by EA Initiatives, and to develop a set of possible scenarios for the future of EA management. In this sense, the survey answers four core questions as follows:
The project is carried out in cooperation between TUM and Detecon.