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A situational method for semi-automated Enterprise Architecture Documentation

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Abstract

The business capabilities of modern enterprises crucially rely on the enterprises’ information systems and underlying IT infrastructure. Hence, optimization of the business-IT alignment is a key objective of Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM). To achieve this objective, EAM creates, maintains and analyzes a model of the current state of the Enterprise Architecture. This model covers different concepts reflecting both the business and the IT perspective and has to be constantly maintained in response to ongoing transformations of the enterprise. In practice, EA models grow large and are difficult to maintain, since many stakeholders from various backgrounds have to contribute architecture-relevant information. EAM literature and two practitioner surveys conducted by the authors indicate that EA model maintenance, in particular the manual documentation activities, poses one of the biggest challenges to EAM in practice. Current research approaches target the automation of the EA documentation based on specific data sources. These approaches, as our systematic literature review showed, do not consider enterprise specificity of the documentation context or the variability of the data sources from organization to organization. The approach presented in this article specifically accounts for these factors and presents a situational method for EA documentation. It builds on four process-supported documentation techniques which can be selected, composed and applied to design an organization-specific documentation process. The techniques build on a meta-model for EA documentation, which is implemented in an EA-repository prototype that supports the configuration and execution of the documentation techniques. We applied our documentation method assembly process at a German insurance company and report the findings from this case study in particular regarding practical applicability and usability of our approach.

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Notes

  1. http://scholar.google.com.

  2. We call them “Model Areas”.

  3. http://myclass.peelschools.org/sec/12/4268/Resources/RACI_R_Web3_1.pdf.

  4. In BPMN 2.0 cogwheels denote automated tasks, person icons denote human tasks, hand icons denote offline tasks, three parallel lines in a task denote multiple instances, a plus sign in a task denotes a sub-process contained in a task, arrows starting with a diamond denote conditional flows and arrows starting with a short crossing line denote the default flow.

  5. To increase the readability, we have omitted the role lanes in this figure. All tasks are performed by the method engineer except the method execution.

  6. Information models are organization-specific meta-models according to the terminology used in [10].

  7. Note that the implementation focus of the prototype is laid on data collection mechanisms and does not include EA visualization capabilities.

  8. http://www.springsource.org.

  9. http://www.vaadin.org.

  10. http://www.w3.org/RDF.

  11. http://jena.apache.org.

  12. http://activiti.org.

  13. http://www.iteraplan.de.

  14. The server configuration file contains the names and routing information of the main web-based information systems of the organization.

  15. http://portal.acm.org.

  16. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.

  17. http://www.sosym.org.

  18. http://www.globalaea.org/?page=JEAOverview.

  19. http://www.wi-inf.uni-duisburg-essen.de/MobisPortal/index.php?lang=en.

  20. http://www.misq.org/.

  21. http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu.

  22. http://www.edoc2014.org.

  23. The proceedings of TEAR were published with several different publishers of which some can be found here: http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/conf/tear/index.html.

  24. http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/conf/caise/index.html.

  25. http://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis/.

  26. http://www.ecis.org/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer Science, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

    Matthias Farwick & Ruth Breu

  2. iteratec GmbH, 82008 , Munich, Unterhaching, Germany

    Christian M. Schweda & Inge Hanschke

Authors
  1. Matthias Farwick
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  2. Christian M. Schweda
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  3. Ruth Breu
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  4. Inge Hanschke
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Matthias Farwick.

Additional information

Communicated by Prof. Franck Barbier.

Appendix

Appendix

1.1 Systematic literature review details

As a first step of the literature review, the main two research questions were fixed. These were the following:

  1. 1.

    What is the related work in the context of (automated) Enterprise Architecture Documentation in EA research literature?

  2. 2.

    Is there literature that combines EA documentation research and situational method engineering?

We then crafted a protocol of the review execution that included the method of data collection, a timeline as well as quality criteria for inclusion of literature. The categories for of the literature were established during the review process. In the following, we describe the review process in more detail and then list the data sources and keywords that were used for the review.

1.1.1 Review process

In the first step, we used the scientific literature search engine Google Scholar to search for terms which we list below. We went through the first ten pages of results, leading to a manual search of the top 100 search results on Google Scholar per search term. Relevant papers were first collected in a preliminary list. Also in this step, we manually searched through the last ten years of publications of the journals and proceedings of scientific events listed below. From the first list of identified papers, we performed a backward search of the included references as well as a forward search of papers citing a given article via Google Scholar. A second list was created in this step for which this procedure was repeated until no new relevant literature was identified.

In addition to the search of scientific literature, we included several books from practitioners in the review. The general inclusion criteria were the description of practices or recommendations for the manual or automated maintenance of EA models and in particular any reference to situativeness in the documentation approach. Since the amount of identified literature was comparatively little and we wanted to get a general overview of the state of research in EA documentation, we did not specify any exclusion criteria regarding the quality of evaluation of the identified literature. Publications by the same author on the same topic were not considered twice. Hence, we always included the newest publication in such cases.

1.1.2 Data sources

As already mentioned above, the main database that was searched was Google Scholar as it integrated several other main search engines including the ACM PortalFootnote 15 and the IEEE XPlore Digital Libary.Footnote 16

Journals

  • Software and Systems Modeling (SOSYM)Footnote 17

  • Journal of Enterrise Architecture (JEA)Footnote 18

  • Enterprise Modeling and Information Systems Architectures (MoBIS)Footnote 19

  • Management Information Systems Quartely (MISQ)Footnote 20

Scientific events

  • Hawaii International Conference On System Sciences (HICSS)Footnote 21

  • Enterprise Distributed Objects Conference and Workshops (EDOC)Footnote 22

  • Trends in Enterprise Architecture Research Workshop (TEAR)Footnote 23

  • International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CaiSE)Footnote 24

  • Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS)Footnote 25

  • European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS)Footnote 26

1.1.3 Search terms

In the following, we list the search terms that were used to search Google Scholar. The term “enterprise architecture” was combined with the following list of keywords. The first ten pages of results were examined.

$$\begin{aligned}&\{``enterprise~architecture\hbox {''}\}\,\times \,\{\\&``documentation~modeling\hbox {''},\\&``maintenance\hbox {''},\\&``model~maintenance\hbox {''},\\&``update\hbox {''},\\&``up-to-date\hbox {''},\\&``documentation~process\hbox {''},\\&``modeling~process,\hbox {''}\\&``architectural~description\hbox {''},\\&``data~collection\hbox {''},\\&``model~repository\hbox {''},\\&``model~repository~update\hbox {''},\\&``information~retrieval\hbox {''},\\&``model~quality\hbox {''},\\&``model~quality~assurance\hbox {''},\\&``actuality\hbox {''},\\&``update\hbox {''},\\&``semantic~integration\hbox {''},\\&``data~source\hbox {''},\\&``information~source\hbox {''},\\&``data~collection\hbox {''},\\&``automated~data~collection\hbox {''},\\&``information~collection\hbox {''},\\&``automatic\hbox {''},\\&``automated\hbox {''},\\&``semi-automated\hbox {''},\\&``challenge\hbox {''},\\&``master~data~management\hbox {''},\\&``situational~method\hbox {''}\\&\} \end{aligned}$$

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Farwick, M., Schweda, C.M., Breu, R. et al. A situational method for semi-automated Enterprise Architecture Documentation. Softw Syst Model 15, 397–426 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-014-0407-3

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