Enterprise Architecture Documentation: Current Practices and Future Directions

Over the past decade Enterprise Architecture (EA) management matured to a discipline commonly perceived as a strategic advantage. Among others, EA management helps to identify and realize cost saving potentials in organizations. EA initiatives commonly start by documenting the status-quo of the EA. The respective management discipline analyzes this so-called current state and derives intermediate planned states heading towards a desired target state of the architecture. Several EA frameworks describe this process in theory. However, during practical application, organizations struggle with documenting the EA and lack concrete guidance during the process. To underline our observations and confirm our hypotheses, we conducted a survey among 140 EA practitioners to analyze issues organizations face while documenting the EA and keeping the documentation up to date. In this paper we present results on current practices, challenges, and automation techniques for EA documentation in a descriptive manner.