Ronny Fischer

Essential Layers, Artifacts, and Dependencies of Enterprise Architecture

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.

A Federated Approach to Enterprise Architecture Model Maintenance

Enterprise architecture is gaining acceptance as an approach to manage change and foster IT/business alignment by (1) propagating strategy and process changes to the software and infrastructure level, by (2) supporting consistent business transformation enabled by technology innovations, and by (3) decoupling business-oriented and technology-oriented architectures. Due to constant change in business as well as in technology, enterprise architecture management is a permanent process rather than a one-time effort. To keep enterprise architecture models up-to-date, a well-engineered maintenance concept including processes, roles and schedules is needed. This paper discusses the shortcomings of existing approaches to enterprise architecture model maintenance, proposes a federated approach, and reports on its implementation at a large financial service provider.