Requirements for Automated Enterprise Architecture Model Maintenance - A Requirements Analysis based on a Literature Review and an Exploratory Survey

Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is the practice of modeling the business and IT artifacts in an enterprise and relating them with each other. By documenting these interdependencies between business and the supporting IT, strategic decisions can be made towards a planned and consolidated enterprise architecture that matches the business needs. However, enterprise architecture models can grow very large, thus making the manual creation and maintenance of these models a difficult and time consuming task. From this, we derived the three research questions of this paper: (i) Which related work exists on the maintenance of EA models, and does it refer to automation techniques? (ii) Is EA maintenance automation demanded by practitioners? If yes, (iii) What are the requirements for such an automation method and tool? In this paper we tackle these questions by conducting a literature analysis on EA literature from research and practice. In addition, we present the results of a survey among EA practitioners we conducted to find out current maintenance practices. We then describe a collection of requirements for an automated EA maintenance method and tool, that we derived from the results of the survey, the findings in the literature review and our own experience as EA consultants. Finally, we present several success evaluation criteria for an automated EA maintenance solution.

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