A Component-Oriented Tool-Approach to Enterprise Architecture Management

1 Motivation The discipline of Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM), while becoming firmly established with global enterprises, often remains unnoticed by medium-sized enterprises. In global enterprises the role of enterprise architects has been established for years, and they are equipped by EAM tools with underlying EA frameworks such as the Zachman Framework (Zachman 1987, p. 276-292) or TOGAF (The Open Group 2009, p. 7). In smaller companies, however, the role of an enterprise architect may not even be defined or is poorly supported in terms of resources, budget, and influence. Peyret (2007) reports that, in the year 2006, only 26% of the small and medium-sized companies made use EAM tools. Yet, the need for a proper alignment of business and IT is more than ever a key to success-especially for medium-sized enterprises competing on a global market. EAM is a means to achieve this alignment, providing a holistic view of an enterprise's different architecture domains such as business, application, data and infrastructure (The Open Group 2009, P. 10). With respect to the complexity of these architecture domains and their relations, management tools play an important role in order to keep track of the architecture development and the business IT Alignment (Technische Universität München 2008, P. 23-37). Tool vendors are most often focusing on large enterprises, providing almost universal support for the entire architecture. This leads to complex and expensive tools requiring huge effort in customizing and professional training courses for the designated staff – a barrier hard to overcome by medium-sized enterprises.