An enterprise architecture management pattern for software change project cost analysis

Abstract

Business environments today progress and change rapidly. Most business processes are supported by information systems and since the business processes change the information systems need to be changed as well. An essential issue with today's software systems is that many of them are interconnected, thus a change to one system may cause a ripple effect among other systems. Also, numerous systems have been developed and modified during many years and to make further changes to them requires a lot of effort from the organization. This paper suggests enterprise architecture as an approach to model software systems and their environment. An enterprise architecture management pattern in the form of a metamodel for change project costs modeling and analysis is presented. IT decision makers can use this metamodel in order to make cost predictions and do risk analysis for their change projects. The employment of the model is illustrated with ten projects.