Essential Layers, Artifacts, and Dependencies of Enterprise Architecture

Abstract

After a period where implementation speed was more important than integration, consistency and reduction of complexity, architectural considerations have become a key issue of information management in recent years again. Enterprise architecture is widely accepted as an essential mechanism for ensuring agility and consistency, compliance and efficiency. Although standards like TOGAF and FEAF have developed, however, there is no common agreement on which architecture layers, which artifact types and which dependencies constitute the essence of enterprise architecture. This paper contributes to the identification of essential elements of enterprise architecture by (1) specifying enterprise architecture as a hierarchical, multilevel system comprising aggregation hierarchies, architecture layers and views, (2) discussing enterprise architecture frameworks with regard to essential elements, (3) proposing interfacing requirements of enterprise architecture with other architecture models and (4) matching these findings with current enterprise architecture practice in several large companies. Keywords enterprise architecture, architectural components, architectural layers, architectural views, interfaces The components of an EA framework should be applicable for a broad range of corporations and government agencies. Traditionally, architecture in the information systems context is focusing on IT related artifacts like IT platforms, software components and services, applications, IT processes, and maybe IT strategy in order to support more efficient IT operations, better return on IT investment, and faster, simpler and cheaper IT procurement (Opengroup 2003). In contrast to this approach which better should be designated information systems architecture (ISA), EA should also include business related artifacts like organizational goals, products and services, markets,

Model enablement in organizational design and enterprise engineering: the why, the how and the what

“…Unfortunately, there is no consensus about how many and which dimensions to use as a reference in OD&EE and how to scale these dimensions. Many proposals both from the scientific community (e.g., in the context of enterprise architecture [23]) and from the world of practice (e.g., Archimate, cf. [18]), provide good arguments why a certain stack of layers, a certain system of stakeholder groups, or a certain understanding of dynamics is preferable.…”

Planning Support for Enterprise Changes

“…[17] and [18]). Several sources in literature consider different types of changes in application landscape transformation.…”

New Avenues for Theoretical Contributions in Enterprise Architecture Principles - A Literature Review

“…The time-wise turning points in EA principles are 2006 and 2011, with four articles in each point. To date, twelve articles studied EA principles as the core of their research [3-5, 7-11, 14, 15, 25, 26] and seven articles investigate them among other topics [6,12,13,[27][28][29][30]. According to Google Scholar, the articles with focus on EA principles are mostly low cited (less than 20 citations), two average-cited (20-80 citations) and only one is high cited (more than 80 citations).…”

“…Since little is known about EA principles in EA research, prior work mostly concentrated on EA principles nature through: (1) suggesting an exhaustive and comprehensible definition of EA principles and shedding light on the role of principles [3-6, 8, 9, 11-15]; (2) discussing the formulation and statement of EA principles, as a set of constraints on the syntax and semantics of EA principles documentation [7,10,11,26]; (3) categorizing EA principles into different areas and scope [10,[25][26][27]; (4) suggesting a set of EA principles, which are either generic or company (context)-specific [10,26,[28][29][30]. We thus reveal four streams of research related to the nature of EA principles namely EA principles definition and role, EA principles documentation, EA principles classification, and EA principles proposition.…”