Matthias Farwick

Automation Processes for Enterprise Architecture Management

Creating and maintaining an enterprise architecture model that is both up-to-date and accurate is a difficult task due to the size and complexity of the models and the dispersed nature of EA information in organizations. In current EA maintenance processes, the models are maintained manually with only little automation, which is a time consuming task. Literature from research and practice has identified this challenge, but only few scientific publications actually address the issue of EA model maintenance and its automation. In our research effort on Living Models, we are working towards solutions for a closer connection between EA models and what they represent in the real world. In this article we present (semi-)automated processes for maintaining enterprise architecture models by gathering information from both human input and technical interfaces and discuss implementation issues for realizing the processes in practice. This work is one of the first steps in the direction of minimizing manual work for EAM by automation and increasing EA data quality attributes such as consistency and actuality.

Enterprise Architecture Documentation: Empirical Analysis of Information Sources for Automation

Over the past decade, Enterprise Architecture (EA) management emerged to a mature discipline commonly applied to realize cost saving potentials while increasing effectiveness of IT in organizations. Typically, EA management starts by documenting the current state in an EA model and deriving future planned states heading towards an optimized EA. In practice, organizations struggle with the documentation of their current state due to the complexity of their enterprise architecture and its frequent changes. Current research activities seek to automate the data collection process by integrating existing EA information sources of operative systems. However, a comprehensive analysis of possible information sources and their appropriateness for EA is not yet provided. To build an empirical basis, this paper presents findings of a survey conducted on the key problems in EA documentation as well as the appropriateness of specific EA information sources for automation with respect to provided data types and data quality.

A Meta-Model for Automated Enterprise Architecture Model Maintenance

Maintaining a high quality enterprise architecture (EA) model that is up-to-date and consistent is a difficult but crucial task. The reasons for this difficulty are the size and complexity of EA models, frequent changes in the architecture and the challenge of collecting EA data from different stakeholders in large organizations. In our research project Living IT-Landscape Models we are working towards a tighter synchronization between EA models and what they represent in the real world, thus increasing the model actuality and consistency. With our previous work we have established semi-automated processes for EA data collection and quality assurance. To support these processes an implementing EAM tool needs to be able work with contextual information that is not typically stored alongside the EA models. In the paper at hand we describe a meta-model that incorporates the required context information and can form the basis for EAM tools that support i) recurring data collection from data sources, ii) maintaining relations from imported elements to their sources, iii) storing actuality related characteristics for triggering updates, and iv) identifying properties used to avoid duplicate entries. Related work has acknowledged the relevance of the problem, however no comprehensive approaches to for automating EA model maintenance have been presented yet.

A situational method for semi-automated Enterprise Architecture Documentation

The business capabilities of modern enterprises crucially rely on the enterprises’ information systems and underlying IT infrastructure. Hence, optimization of the business-IT alignment is a key objective of Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM). To achieve this objective, EAM creates, maintains and analyzes a model of the current state of the Enterprise Architecture. This model covers different concepts reflecting both the business and the IT perspective and has to be constantly maintained in response to ongoing transformations of the enterprise. In practice, EA models grow large and are difficult to maintain, since many stakeholders from various backgrounds have to contribute architecture-relevant information. EAM literature and two practitioner surveys conducted by the authors indicate that EA model maintenance, in particular the manual documentation activities, poses one of the biggest challenges to EAM in practice. Current research approaches target the automation of the EA documentation based on specific data sources. These approaches, as our systematic literature review showed, do not consider enterprise specificity of the documentation context or the variability of the data sources from organization to organization. The approach presented in this article specifically accounts for these factors and presents a situational method for EA documentation. It builds on four process-supported documentation techniques which can be selected, composed and applied to design an organization-specific documentation process. The techniques build on a meta-model for EA documentation, which is implemented in an EA-repository prototype that supports the configuration and execution of the documentation techniques. We applied our documentation method assembly process at a German insurance company and report the findings from this case study in particular regarding practical applicability and usability of our approach.

A web-based collaborative metamodeling environment with secure remote model access

This contribution presents GEMSjax - a web-based metamodeling tool for the collaborative development of domain specific languages. By making use of modern Web 2.0 technologies like Ajax and REST services, the tool allows for simultaneous web browser-based creation/ editing of metamodels and model instances, as well as secure remote model access via REST, which enables remote model modification over a simple HTTP-based interface. This paper describes the complex technical challenges we faced and solutions we produced to provide browser-based synchronous model editing. It further explains on the XACML-based access control mechanisms to provide secure remote access to models and model elements. Additionally, we highlight the usefulness of our approach by describing its application in a realistic usage scenario.

Living Modeling of IT Architectures: Challenges and Solutions

Enterprise Architecture Models (EA Models) are documentations capturing the elements of an enterprise’s IT infrastructure, setting these elements in relation to each other and setting them into the context of the business. EA Models are a crucial backbone for any IT management process and activities like analysing IT related risks and planning investments. The more companies depend on reliable IT services and use IT as innovation driver, the more high quality EA Models provide competitive advantage. In this paper we describe core challenges to the maintenance of EA Models based on previously conducted surveys and our longstanding experience in industrial collaborations. This is followed by a sketch of an innovative solution to solve these challenges.

On Enterprise Architecture Change Events

In practice it is difficult to maintain a high quality enterprise architecture (EA) model with regards to its actuality and completeness. However, neither literature from practice and EA frameworks nor EA research literature provide sufficient guidance for the difficult task of maintaining EA models. Recently, researchers have presented methods to collect structured data from existing data sources, e.g. from IT operations in order to (semi-)automatically update EA models. In this paper, we make an argument for the additional use of EA change events from (management) information systems. These change events do not provide clearly mappable structured information, but can be used to trigger and guide manual EA model maintenance tasks when changes occur. We present the first classification of relevant events in EA literature, detailing on their sources and impact on the EA model. Finally, we propose a model maintenance workflow that is driven by events, explain an example usage case and point to open issues in the context of EA change events.

Towards Living Landscape Models: Automated Integration of Infrastructure Cloud in Enterprise Architecture Management

Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM), and in particular IT--landscape management try to model the IT- and business elements of a company, in order to analyze its efficiency towards supporting business goals, optimize business--IT alignment, and to plan future IT--transformation as well as IT--standardization. A major challenge in this field is the elicitation of infrastructure information from run--time systems, e.g., to answer the question which servers provide services to a specific information system. Capturing this data is a time consuming manual task which leads to quickly outdated information. Similar to traditional hardware, cloud infrastructure needs to be documented in an EA modeling order to gain insight on its relationships with business information systems and ultimately the business goals. The aim of our research in this area is the automatic integration of various runtime information sources into an EAM view. The overall goal is to minimize manual work to keep enterprise architecture information up--to--date. This enables enterprise architects to make timely and precise decisions. In this work we focus on how information on the cloud infrastructure can be seamlessly integrated into an EA view. Making the cloud visible for enterprise architects is especially important to meet legal (privacy) requirements, on the storage and processing location of data. We present a conceptual approach for the information integration problem, and introduce our prototypical implementation with the open--source infrastructure cloud implementation Eucalyptus, and the open--source enterprise architecture management tool iteraplan.

Gateway to Quality Living for the Elderly: Charting an Innovative Approach to Evidence-Based E-Health Technologies for Serving the Chronically Ill

In this paper, we explore four critical barriers to e-Health effectiveness and discuss why and how to build and evaluate e-Health technologies for the chronically ill, including: (1) gaps in knowledge about learning and health behaviors, (2) metrics for technology adoption and beneficial use, (3) sampling and decision support, and (4) adherence and adaptive care customization. Accordingly, the metaphor of a “gateway” is used to imply that healthcare providers and the individuals they serve must engage in a sensible two-way interactions, on the one hand, it should open the door for providers to offer personalized and cost-effective care, on the other hand, it should also open the door to a welcoming environment that provides easy access and motivation for sustained use by the chronically-ill individuals.

A Case Study on Textual Enterprise Architecture Modeling

Todays Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) tools are based on forms and graphical modeling capabilities via web-based applications or desktop clients. However, recent developments in textual modeling tools have not yet been considered for EA modeling in research and practice. In this paper we present a novel EAM-tool approach, called Txture, that consists of a textual modeling environment and a web-application to provide enterprise-wide architecture visualizations for different stakeholder groups. The tool is in production use at a major Austrian data center, where it proofed to be intuitive and provide efficient modeling capabilities compared to traditional approaches. In this paper we present lessons learned from the development of the tool as well as usage it and report on its benefits and drawbacks.