Systemic classification of concern-based design methods in the context of enterprise architecture

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a relatively new domain that is rapidly developing. “The primary reason for developing EA is to support business by providing the fundamental technology and process structure for an IT strategy” [TOGAF]. EA models have to model enterprises facets that span from marketing to IT. As a result, EA models tend to become large. Large EA models create a problem for model management. Concern-based design methods (CBDMs) aim to solve this problem by considering EA models as a composition of smaller, manageable parts—concerns. There are dozens of different CBDMs that can be used in the context of EA: from very generic methods to specific methods for business modeling or IT implementations. This variety of methods can cause two problems for those who develop and use innovative CBDMs in the field of Enterprise Architecture (EA). The first problem is to choose specific CBDMs that can be used in a given EA methodology: this is a problem for researchers who develop their own EA methodology. The second problem is to find similar methods (with the same problem domain or with similar frameworks) in order to make a comparative analysis with these methods: this is a problem of researchers who develop their own CBDMs related to a specific problem domain in EA (such as business process modeling or aspect oriented programming). We aim to address both of these problems by means of a definition of generic Requirements for CBDMs based on the system inquiry. We use these requirements to classify twenty CBDMs in the context of EA. We conclude with a short discussion about trends that we have observed in the field of concern-based design and modeling.