A Federated Approach to Enterprise Architecture Model Maintenance

Abstract

This report introduces an approach how Enterprise Architecture (EA) design can be deployed in a large financial organisation for strategic transformation. Our EA design embraces all main components of the business organisations, its information systems and the way they work to achieve business objectives. In order to tackle such EA design and its deployment, governance, design and measurement principles are required to keep EA consistent and avoid misunderstandings among stakeholders. Since EA focuses on a holistic view of the organisation, full EA deployment is risky due to cost and organisational impact. Therefore we use an iterative approach within EA deployment that will be considered as an assessment process evaluating the whole IT-landscape of a certain CIO area. There are metrics used which allow the identification of transformation objects and these will be reworked in different structures by using architectural principles and then integrated into EA. Finally the existing EA will be evaluated (together with transformation object) by EA design principles and either the transformation will be rejected or design principles will be adopted. In order to make this model operative it is embedded in an architecture organizational structure which is independent from the organizational structure of the enterprise.