A Pattern-based Approach to Quantitative Enterprise Architecture Analysis

Enterprise Architecture (EA) management involves tasks that substantially contribute to the operations of an enterprise, and to its sustainable market presence. One important aspect of this is the availability of services to customers. However, the increasing interconnectedness of systems with other systems and with business processes makes it difficult to get a clear view on change impacts and dependency structures. While management level decision makers need this information to make sound decisions, EA models often do not include quality attributes (such as availability), and very rarely provide quantitative means to assess them. We address these shortcomings by augmenting an information model for EA modeling with concepts from Probabilistic Relational Models, thus enabling quantitative analysis. A sample business case is evaluated as an example of the technique, showing how decision makers can benefit from information on availability impacts on enterprise business services

Application Portfolio Management—An Integrated Framework and a Software Tool Evaluation Approach

Despite the growing number of organizations that have lost track of their application landscape and have suffered from a sharp increase in application portfolio complexity, a comprehensive and systematic approach to Application Portfolio Management (APM) still appears far from being adopted. To move the adoption process along, this paper develops a comprehensive framework assimilating and extending previous research and presents an APM process comprising data collection, analysis, decision-making, and optimization phases. This paper also presents an approach for evaluating software tools for APM and identifies which software tool families are best able to provide support for specific purposes. With this integrated conceptual guideline for APM and its translation into a model for measuring appropriate practical support, this paper not only allows for a move more deeply into the research area but also offers advice for both researchers and practitioners

An Exploration of Enterprise Architecture Research

Management of the enterprise architecture has become increasingly recognized as a crucial part of both business and IT management. Still, a common understanding and methodological consistency seems far from being developed. Acknowledging the significant role of research in moving the development process along, this article employs different bibliometric methods, complemented by an extensive qualitative interpretation of the research field, to provide a unique overview of the enterprise architecture literature. After answering our research questions about the collaboration via co-authorships, the intellectual structure of the research field and its most influential works, and the principal themes of research, we propose an agenda for future research based on the findings from the above analyses and their comparison to empirical insights from the literature. In particular, our study finds a considerable degree of co-authorship clustering and a positive impact of the extent of co-authorship on the diffusion of works on enterprise architecture. In addition, this article identifies three major research streams and shows that research to date has revolved around specific themes, while some of high practical relevance receive minor attention. Hence, the contribution of our study is manifold and offers support for researchers and practitioners alike