Title: A rationale for the choice of enterprise architecture method and software technology in a software driven enterprise

Authors: D. Venkatesan; S. Sridhar

Addresses: Department of Information Technology, Bharathidasan Institute of Technology, Anna University Chennai, Tiruchirapalli, India ' Department of Information Science and Technology, Anna University Chennai, India

Abstract: Enterprise architecture frameworks (EAFs) provide tools and methods to categorise, document and depict interrelationship between enterprise business processes, stakeholders and information classes. It explicitly documents information generation, processing and consumption pattern facilitating communication and management. But there is a confusing variety of EAFs for organisations to choose from. There is no explicit guidance or justifiable rationale available to choose an EAF over others. This paper provides a rationale and attributes based evaluation of popular EAFs and conclude superiority of Zachman framework (ZF) for a software-driven enterprise (SDE). Further, this paper surveys salient aspects of different software technologies and provide an assessment framework to compare them and conclude suitability of agent technology for realising information system infrastructure of an SDE. This work makes a provocative argument that many of the modern EAFs are not suited for an SDE due to their affiliation to software technologies that are found to has several limitations.

Keywords: enterprise architecture; EA; enterprise architecture framework; EAF; business model alignment; BAM; enterprise software; software architecture; model driven development; MDD; system modelling; information systems design; agent technology.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIS.2019.103080

International Journal of Business Information Systems, 2019 Vol.32 No.3, pp.272 - 311

Received: 22 Mar 2017
Accepted: 29 Dec 2017
Published online: 15 Oct 2019 *

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