A Comparison of Frameworks for Enterprise Architecture Modeling

Presentation notes: (⊗ means advance and may occur more than once for animated slides) Slide 0 – Title ⊗ Slide 1 – Outline I'll begin with some of the nineteen principles that we have identified relative to modeling and frameworks, then add some observations about the use of frameworks for enterprise architecture followed by a brief overview of 3 frameworks among 20 or so identified, and finish with our take on the complementary nature of the examples. ⊗ Slide 2 – What's a Framework Our concept of a framework is a container for components. Those components are generally artifacts resulting from a modeling process that occurs internal to the enterprise or externally in which case the artifacts represent the explicit or implicit model acquired. We add implicit because it is rare that we receive the model artifacts upon which an acquired product is constructed. The models contained are interconnected in many different ways that the framework must be able to recognize and for which access, both to model components and their connections, must be provided. By enabling the assessment of artifact fidelity to the enterprise it represents and of consistency in representation across artifacts. We examine frameworks from four aspects. ⊗ Slide 3 – Structure We characterize structure by arrangement and three distinct scales, distinguishing decomposition from the categorical arrangements for which we use the term ordinate to indicate that they usually have a small number of coordinates, either ordered or unordered. Quite naturally a detail scaling applies to decompositional arrangements. ⊗ Slide 4 – Connections Among the many kinds of connections, we find ⊗ dependence, equivalence, and transitivity to have particular utility in presenting artifact relationships. For example, ⊗ ordered dependence is indicative of purpose and dependence in decomposition provided by recursion. ⊗ Slide 5 – Views Viewing mechanisms allow artifacts to be filtered or rearranged for a particular purpose. Many framework standards include particularly specified views. ⊗ Slide 6 – Constraints