Introduction: Third Workshop on Trends in Enterprise Architecture Research (TEAR 2008)

The field of enterprise architecture attracted the attention of the research community for the first time when Zachman introduced the Framework for Information Systems Architecture in 1987. However, it was not until 1996 that enterprise architecture emerged as an active field of business activity and research. Enterprise architecture (EA) is important because organizations need to adapt with increasing speeed to changing customer requirements and business goals. This need influences the entire chain of activities of an enterprise, from business processes to IT support. To keep the enterprise architecture coherent and aligned with business goals, the relations between the different architectures must be clearly defined and consistent. In previous years, the emergence of service oriented design paradigms (e.g. Service Oriented Architecture, SOA) contributed to the relevance of enterprise architectures. The need to design services along business processes forced companies to pay more attention to business architectures. At the same time, the growing complexity of existing application landscapes lead to increased attention to application architectures. To better align business and IS architectures a number of major companies started to establish EA efforts after introducing service oriented architectures. Until recently, practitioners, consulting firms and tool vendors have been leading in the development of the EA discipline. Research on enterprise architecture has been taking place in relatively isolated communities. The main objective of this workshop is to bring these different communities of EA researchers together and to identify future directions for EA research with special focus on service oriented paradigms. An important question in that respect is what EA researchers should do, as opposed to EA practitioners.