The data building blocks of the enterprise architect

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Abstract

When setting up an Enterprise Architecture a number of decisions have to be made with respect to data storage and data transmissions. In this paper we bring a structured overview of those data aspects on which decisions need to be made, and we show that different nodes in a data exchange are dependent upon decisions made by another node with respect to these data aspects. Communicating the decisions on data aspects can happen via architectural descriptions.

Section snippets

Existing enterprise architecture frameworks lack comprehensiveness

Many Enterprise Architecture (EA) Frameworks exist (see e.g. [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7]). All of these frameworks, however, miss the coverage of a number of aspects that are important in information engineering. Let us consider the Zachman framework [1] for example. This framework is often said to be the most comprehensive EA framework. The Zachman framework says that an Enterprise Architecture effort should consider six aspects of an enterprise: the what, how, where, who, when and why

An overview of the data building blocks

The data aspects will be presented in four steps. First, we build the data exchange network by looking at the location of the nodes in the network and the fact that they are connected. Next we look at the characteristics of data becoming initially available in some node of the network. Subsequently, we investigate how data is transmitted between two directly connected nodes in the network. Finally, we interconnect multiple node-to-node data transmissions.

Nodes are dependent upon decisions made by other nodes

Nodes are dependent upon decisions that are implemented by another node. In what follows we illustrate this for the data aspects mentioned above.

So far, the dependency illustrations were related to simple node-to-node transmissions. The fact that different transmissions are interrelated may have a positive or a negative influence on dependencies in comparison to the situation where only a single node-to-node transmission is considered.

We note that Table 1 and Table 2 only provide a number of

Conclusions

In this paper we have given an overview of the data aspects upon which decisions need to be made when setting up data transmissions. This overview should not be seen as just some summation of elements. First, it does bring many topics together, and it does this in a structured way. Secondly, it normalizes these topics into individual data aspects, so as to stress the individual decisions that are actually made and their relativeindependence. This is something that, surprisingly, was not done

Frank G. Goethals completed his Master studies in economics (option informatics), at the K.U.Leuven, Belgium, in 2001. He is presently researching for a Ph.D. under the theme of ‘Extended Enterprise Infrastructures’. This research is conducted at the K.U.Leuven under the guidance of professor J. Vandenbulcke, and is financed by SAP Belgium. Frank has a strong interest in Web services technology and Enterprise Architecture, and is investigating how supply chain partners could integrate their

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    Frank G. Goethals completed his Master studies in economics (option informatics), at the K.U.Leuven, Belgium, in 2001. He is presently researching for a Ph.D. under the theme of ‘Extended Enterprise Infrastructures’. This research is conducted at the K.U.Leuven under the guidance of professor J. Vandenbulcke, and is financed by SAP Belgium. Frank has a strong interest in Web services technology and Enterprise Architecture, and is investigating how supply chain partners could integrate their systems efficiently and effectively.

    Wilfried Lemahieu holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Applied Economic Sciences of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (1999). At present, he is associate professor at the Management Informatics research group of this department. His teaching includes Database Management, Data Storage Architectures and Management Informatics. His research interests comprise distributed object architectures and web services, object-relational and object-oriented database systems and hypermedia systems.

    Monique Snoeck obtained her Ph.D. in May 1995 from The Department of Computer Science of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven with a thesis that lays the formal foundations of the object-oriented business modelling method MERODE. Since then she has done further research in the area of formal methods for object-oriented conceptual modelling. She now is Associate Professor with the Management Information Systems Group of the Department of Applied Economic Sciences at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. She has been involved in several industrial conceptual modelling projects. Her research interest are object oriented conceptual modelling, software architecture and software quality.

    Jacques A. Vandenbulcke  is professor at the Department of Applied Economic Sciences of the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. His main research interests are in Database management, Data modelling, and Business Information Systems. He is co-ordinator of the Leuven Institute for Research on Information Systems (LIRIS) and holder of the SAP-chair on ‘Extended enterprise ICT-infrastructures’. He is president of ‘Studiecentrum voor Automatische Informatieverwerking (SAI)’, the largest society for computer professionals in Belgium, and co-founder and vice-president of the ‘Production and Inventory Control Society (PICS)’ in Belgium.

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