Bottom-up EA Management Governance using Recommender Systems

Abstract

Enterprise Architecture (EA) Management is an activity that seeks to foster the alignment of business and IT, and pursues various goals further operationalizing this alignment. Key to effective EA Management is a framework that defines the roles, activities, and viewpoints used for EA Management in accordance to the concerns that the stakeholders aim to address. Consensus holds that such frameworks are organization-specific and hence they are designed in governance activities for EA Management. As of today, top-down approaches for governance are used to derive organization-specific frameworks. These usually lack systematic mechanisms for improving the framework based on the feedback of the responsible stakeholders. We outline a bottom-up approach for EA Management governance that systematically observes the behavior of the actors to learn user concerns and recommend appropriate viewpoints. With this approach, we complement traditional top-down governance activities.