Towards simulation-supported enterprise architecture management

Abstract

Enterprise architecture management is based on a holistic view on the enterprise addressing business and IT aspects in an integrated manner. EA management is a process to manage the complexity of the overall architecture and to improve the alignment of business and IT. In order to achieve these goals, it is necessary but not sufficient to manage the static complexity that arises from dependencies between the elements of the EA, like goals, organizational units, business processes, business applications, and IT infrastructure elements. Performance, stability, and scalability can only be analyzed, modeled, and controlled, if static EA models are enriched by appropriate abstractions to capture the dynamic complexity of the EA understood as a socio-technical system of interacting (sub-)systems. This article identifies possible techniques to address dynamic complexity in EA. The potential benefits of system simulations are discussed and the derivation of apropriate simulation models is exemplified. A key observation is the fact that EA management is a iterative evolution process, where each iteration only changes a small fraction of the EA. It is therefore possible to automatically derive model parameters required for the simulation of the future architectures from an analysis of the dynamics of the current architecture.