Background

The concept of ?enterprise architecture? (EA) is rapidly gaining popularity in the IT business sector. This is because companies are striving to evolve their businesses such as to efficiently follow their strategies and align their IT infrastructure with their business needs. According to the MIT center for Information Systems Research, ?Enterprise architecture is the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of the company?s operating model. The operating model is the desired state of business process integration and business process standardization for delivering goods and services to costumers?. Therefore, the key reason for employing ?enterprise architecture management? (EAM) is to define the target situation that the company must reach in order to attain a full alignment of business and IT and to sustain the fulfillment of the most suitable evolution scenario that leads the company towards achieving this goal.

Our industry cooperation partner has also very early acknowledged the importance of EAM and has proceeded towards employing the planningIT EAM software suite, to guide the achievement of this task. In their environment, planningIT is used to model the various facets of EA and their interrelations: the various business processes and their application and business-service supports, the interrelations between the various applications, the responsibilities within the organization, etc. However, while the existence of means to sustain the modeling of the previously mentioned ?evolution scenarios? is crucial, planningIT offers a rather limited support for this key-aspect.

Tasks

The purpose of this master thesis is to investigate how various EA evolution scenarios can be efficiently modeled. The environment at our cooperation partner will be used by the student, as a case study for his/her work. As an initial step, the student will need to undergo a thorough literature research in order to achieve a deep understanding of what EA is. Next, several EAM frameworks (like TOGAF, Quosar, etc) will be analyzed with the purpose of identifying recommendations regarding the documentation of evolution scenarios. In parallel, the student will study the planningIT meta-model and will interact with industry representatives, to extract the following information: what information should the evolution scenarios contain? What is currently possible with planningIT? What extensions should be performed? The final goal will be to develop a solution regarding the extension of the planningIT meta-model or the creation of a new one, to permit the efficient modeling of the identified types of evolution scenarios. Finally, a prototype will be developed to validate the proposed solution.

Milestones

Main phases covered in the thesis

1. Perform a thorough literature review, to gain a deep understanding of what ?Enterprise Architecture? and ?Enterprise Architecture Management? are.
2. Analyze various Enterprise Architecture Management frameworks and meticulously document if/how they deal with the documentation of evolution scenarios. Some of the questions that need to be answered are: how is an evolution scenario defined? What are the information needs that are necessary for relevantly describing such a scenario? How is the framework prescribing, the documentation of these scenarios?
3. Taken also the results of the 2nd step in account, conduct various questionnaires, to gather the specific needs of our cooperation partner
4. Analyze the current situation, as depicted by the planningIT meta-model
5. Extend or develop a meta-model to enable the depiction of identified evolution scenarios
6. Develop a prototype to ilustrate the solution concept
7. Perform an evaluation of the findings from the previous point, by performing a relevant case-study.

Prerequisites

1. Interest in enterprise architecture and enterprise architecture management
2. Software engineering knowledge