Enterprise architecture modelling—the issue of integration

Abstract

The problem of aligning and integrating business and IT is hampering many companies in their strategic and tactical development. Constructing integrated architecture models contributes to tackling this problem. Unfortunately, no enterprise architecture description language currently exists that fully enables integrated enterprise modelling. A variety of architectural domains are commonly distinguished for which architects use their own modelling techniques and concepts, tool support, visualisation techniques, etc. In this paper we outline such an integrated language and describe concepts that relate architectural domains. This language also serves as a bridge between other existing modelling languages.

Furthermore, we present the design of a workbench for enterprise architecture that serves as a modelling tool and a tool integration environment at the same time: it supports both the integration of models in existing modelling languages and the integration of existing modelling tools.

Introduction

In current business practice, an integrated approach to business and IT is indispensable. Take for example a company that needs to assess the impact of introducing a new product in its portfolio. This may require defining additional business processes, hiring extra personnel, changing the supporting applications, and augmenting the technological infrastructure to support the additional load of these applications. Perhaps this may even require a change of the organisational structure.

Transferring new information technology to practice requires that a company has a clear, integrated vision on the relation between its business and IT. Without such a vision, the IT infrastructure will never adequately support the business, and vice versa, the business will not optimally profit from IT developments. A vast amount of literature has been written on the topic of strategic alignment, underlining the significance of both ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ components of an organisation [12], for example, distinguish between organisational strategy and organisational infrastructure on the one hand, and IT strategy and IT infrastructure on the other hand. Achieving alignment between business and IT requires an integrated approach to all aspects of the enterprise. Organisational effectiveness is not obtained by local optimisations, but is realised by well-orchestrated interaction of organisational components [27].

Enterprise architecture is an important instrument to address this company-wide integration. It is a coherent whole of principles, methods and models that are used in the design and realisation of the enterprise's organisational structure, business processes, information systems, and infrastructure [1]. However, in practice, these domains are not approached in an integrated way. Every domain speaks its own language, draws its own models, and uses its own techniques and tools. Communication and decision making across domains is seriously impaired. Although some commercially available tools provide the comprehensive functionality needed to develop and maintain enterprise architecture [11], in general tools provide partial support, do not integrate with other tools and cannot be sufficiently configured for the enterprise's context [13].

To create such an integrated perspective on enterprise architecture, one needs both a description technique for architectural models and tool support to realise this in practice. It would not be realistic to suppose that companies will throw their existing design practice and tools overboard and replace these by an entirely new approach. Rather, enterprise modelling should focus on bringing together already existing techniques and integrating these at the appropriate level of abstraction.

In this paper, we present an enterprise modelling language that captures the complexity of architectural domains and their relations, and we describe the design of an integrated enterprise architecture workbench that acts both as a modelling environment for this language and as an infrastructure for integrating with existing modelling languages and tools. These results stem from the ArchiMate project, an applied research project on enterprise architecture (http://archimate.telin.nl).