Over the past decades, an enormous application landscape growth, application landscape complexity management and increasing IT expenses have become critical for the enterprise success. An optimal design of an enterprise's application landscape allows to meet those challenges. For modern enterprises, application landscape design has consequently become a key challenge. For directing the evolution of both, a speci c enterprise architecture and the respective application landscape, design principles serve as key means by, e.g., supporting decision making. Explicit design principles are de ned consciously by enterprise architects. Implicit principles, on the other hand, emerge from within a complex system itself: Decision eects and consequences as well as human behavior are regulated by implicit principles. Current approaches to support enterprise architecture focus on de ning and applying explicit principles. However, to gain a comprehensive understanding and to properly address application landscape design issues, implicit principles need to be accounted for as well. To additionally cover implicit guidelines, a number of researchers proposed to complement existing approaches by integrating system dynamics into enterprise architecture models. The system dynamics concepts provide a method for identifying and visualizing such implicit principles. System dynamics modeling processes and the study of the resulting models contribute especially to establishing architectural thinking and to accomplishing shared mental models amongst the application landscape designer group.
In this thesis, enterprise architectural concepts are presented as well as an overview of the system dynamics perspective and methods. A literature review presents the view of numerous experts on the bene ts of integrating enterprise architecture and system dynamics. Due to the lack of concrete modeling methods that address this issue, a new modeling approach is introduced. This new modeling approach uses a causal loop diagram and is exempli ed by a concrete example on the topic of technological standardization. In expert interviews, the model's content validity and the method's suitability to support communication and reciprocal understanding amongst diverse communities is tested. Potential applications and use cases for causal loop modeling in an enterprise architecture context are revealed within the evaluation. Limits of the presented approach and topics for future research in integrating System Dynamics into EA conclude this thesis.