Master's Thesis Björn Kirschner

Last modified Jun 10, 2015

guided research student project eam collaboration java language thesis

Tool Support for Federated EA Model Management - An Industrial Case Study

Abstract:

Enterprise Architecture (EA) management has come to be an important and well-respected discipline, pursuing the vision of aligning business and IT within a company. Yet the documentation of an enterprise’s architecture still poses problems, as it is often conducted in a time-consuming and error-prone manual process. The key to automated EA documentation is to utilise existing information maintained by the federated, highly specialised modelling communities. Such a federated EA model management approach can help to tackle common problems related to EA documentation and finally improve EA model quality.

As a holistic design for federated EA model management, this thesis introduces ModelGlue. ModelGlue encompasses concepts for EA model branching, differencing, merging and conflict detection as well as an interactive conflict management dashboard. All these concepts are implemented in a prototypical tool solution.

In order to assess the relevance and aptitude of the proposed concepts, ModelGlue had to be evaluated in a working environment. For this thesis, two case studies were conducted in different companies. Input and suggestions provided by EA practitioners were collected in four (case study A) plus three (case study B) intertwined feedback iterations. Findings from each interview cycle were adapted in the prototype.

Besides the informal feedback obtained in the interviews, data excerpts from EA models of both enterprises were imported into ModelGlue. This data comprised 16 quarterly snapshots of the enterprise architecture with an average of over 18.000 model elements per time-slice. It allowed a profound assessment of ModelGlue’s ability to handle realistic data loads.

Schedule:

December January February March April May
____
Implement Importer |____|____
Import HUK Data |____|__________
Gather 1st Feedback |__________|___
Adapt Feedback |_________|________
Gather more Feedback |________|__
Adapt Feedback |_____|_____
Gather even more Feedback |_____|____
Adapt Feedback _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _|______|____________________
Write Thesis |_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _____________________________|
Deadline > Deadline <

Kickoff presentation

Literature

[KiRo14] Kirschner, B., Roth, S.: Towards a Federated Enterprise Architecture Model Management: N-Way Merge of Models for Repositories with Loosely Coupled Schema and Data, (submitted for publication), 2014
[Ro13c] Roth, S., Hauder, M., Michel, F., Münch, D., Matthes, F.: Facilitating Conflict Resolution of Models for Automated Enterprise Architecture Documentation, 19th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2013), Chicago, Illinois, USA, 2013.
[Fa13] Farwick, M., Hauder, M., Roth, S., Matthes, F., Breu, R.: Enterprise Architecture Documentation: Empirical Analysis of Information Sources for Automation - In the 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 46), Maui, Hawaii, 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.
[Ro13b] Roth, S; Matthes, F.: Future Research Topics in Enterprise Architectures Evolution Analysis. In: Design for Future (DFF) Workshop, 2013.
2012
[HMR12] 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.

Incoming references

Files and Subpages

Name	Type	Size	Last Modification
091213 Antritt MA Kirschner.pdf	File	1,69 MB	09.01.2014
131209_Bjoern_Kirschner.mp4	File	26,89 MB	13.12.2013
Ki14.pdf	File	10,26 MB	15.05.2014
Kirschner_AbschlussMA.pdf	File	1,92 MB	20.06.2014