Enterprise architecture | Active Knowledge Modeling

Four Approaches to Enterprise Architecture

December 10, 2010

Enterprise architecture (EA) has been developed by four different disciplines, as shown in the table below.

Discipline	Focus	Architecture	Frameworks and Techniques
Management Consulting	Money	Enterprise Modeling	FEAF, BPM
Information Systems (IS)	People	Enterprise Architecture	Zachman, TOGAF, ARIS
Software Engineering	Software	Model Driven Architecture	UML, MOF, SOAML
Systems Engineering	Hardware	(System of) Systems Architecture	SysML, MODAF, NAF, UPDM

Enterprise modelling was first applied to analyse industrial operations, extending IDEF and other process modeling notations. Later, information systems people applied similar techniques for aligning the IT with the business it supports, and for IT management in general. After software engineering established object oriented modelling of the internals of software systems, systems engineering adapted these techniques to hardware and software co-design. Systems-of-systems thinking led them to extend their reach beyond technology and into the enterprise realm. Read the rest of this entry »

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Enterprise Modeling – What we have learned and what we have not

November 9, 2009

I was recently invited to the second Practice of Enterprise Modeling (PoEM) conference, in Stockholm, 18-19 November. This post introduces the topics that I will talk about there. The objective is to communicate some of our lessons from 15-20 years of enterprise modeling and enterprise architecture development, to highlight advances made, important ideas that were largely forgotten, and to point out directions for future practice development. Some of the lessons presented below are obvious to enterprise modeling practitioners. They are included here because outsiders coming into the field sometimes get them wrong. Other lessons may be more controversial, and they may not be applicable in every situation.

The proceedings of the conference are available from Springer Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing. The presentation is available here (pptx). Read the rest of this entry »