A Lightweight Method for the Modeling of Enterprise Architectures: Introduction and Empirical Validation

This paper defines the high level key concepts necessary to describe enterprise architectures in a manner that is easy to understand and to communicate. We introduce the Enterprise Architecture Modeling method (EAM), which consists of four types of diagrams: the Supply Chain Diagram, showing the main relationships of the enterprise in its business environment; the Enterprise Function Diagrams for the interoperation of enterprise functions; the Scenario Overlay for modeling the most important business processes on top of the Enterprise Function Diagram; and the System Infrastructure Diagram, depicting the technical infrastructure of IT systems and networks. To date, we conducted about 40 case studies in almost all sectors of society. Examples of the diagrams taken from a case study of a recreational accommodation company illustrate the usage of EAM in practice. For further empirical validation we performed an enquiry among modelers and among readers of the enterprise architecture reports. 1 Enterprise Architecture Modeling in Practice Within organizations, especially the larger ones, the use of Enterprise Architecture becomes ever more important. Enterprise architecture descriptions capture the essentials of the business and link them to the essentials of the IT-support. They need to be clearly understandable by business managers as well as by IT-specialists. The language in text and diagrams should be intuitively clear, without a need to learn many technical terms or icons. Despite its importance, we are still far away from a universal architecture language, let alone a universal approach for constructing enterprise architectures. Most existing approaches are burdened under lots of details, while we believe that the main focus of Enterprise Architecture should be on models that capture the essentials and are yet easy to communicate and from which it is therefore also relatively easy to take strategic decisions upon, e.g. outsourcing part of the business. With this paper we hope to bring these desired qualities within the reach of a broad public. Modeling enterprise architecture is a relatively new field and it is hard to find any empirical research to describe it. For the work described in this paper we base ourselves on our extensive experience in practice and academic interest with modeling in IT and architecting in systems development. See [4] for some recent A lightweight Method for the Modeling of Enterprise Architectures 3