An Information Model Capturing the Managed Evolution of Application Landscapes

Projects are the executors of organizational change and hence in charge of the managed evolution of the application landscape in the context of enterprise architecture (EA) management. Although the aforementioned fact is widely agreed upon, no generally accepted information model addressing the challenges arising in the context of future planning and historization of management decisions concerning projects yet exists. This paper addresses this challenge by identifying requirements regarding an information model for linking projects and application landscape management concepts from an extensive survey, during which the demands from practitioners and the existing tool support for EA management were analyzed. Furthermore, we discuss the shortcomings of existing approaches to temporal landscape management in literature and propose an information model capable of addressing the identified requirements by taking related modeling techniques from nearby disciplines into account.