Master Thesis Pouya Aleatrati

In today’s environment, Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is facing the problem of separated departments within an organization. Each department works as an autonomous community with separated Information Technology (IT) applications, role allocations and data models. To integrate these separated data models to a holistic Enterprise Architecture (EA) model, standards and policies are needed. The initiation and maintenance of this enterprise wide framework is aggregated under the aspect of federated Enterprise Architecture Model Management (EAMM). Fischer et al. [FAW07] and Roth [Ro14] defined concepts of a federated approach to EA model maintenance and analyze technical aspects within the community. Governance-specific aspects of federated EAMM were not analyzed in research yet. The management of a holistic EA model might be very complex due to several factors – for instance the company size, the established processes and further quantitative aspects. To ensure controlled and traceable processes within a federated EAMM, the definition of governance structures is advisable. Thus, this thesis focuses on the evaluation of governance-specific aspects of federated EAMM, such as:

• Involved roles and responsibilities
• Governance-specific processes
• Relevant standards and policies

This thesis intends to identify best practices within a federated EAMM, focusing on its influence on the IT governance of an organization. Furthermore, the insights can have an impact on the definition of new standards – for instance process definitions and the general role allocation – in context of federated EAMM. The empirical research includes 11 expert interviews with participants from different industries to discover common best practices of managing a federated EA model. Moreover, the results of the expert interviews are evaluated by an online survey.