Communication of Enterprise Architectures

This chapter presents a communication perspective of enterprise architectures. We provide both a theoretical and a practical perspective of the issues involved in the communication of enterprise architectures. The general idea is that the chapter helps the reader see how architecture development and modelling can be optimally supported by discussing why certain forms of modelling are used in some situation and how this fits the goals in the process. The theoretical perspective will focus on communication during system development in general, where the word system should be interpreted as any open and active system, consisting of both human and computerised actors, that is purposely designed. The practical perspective will take shape as a set of practical guidelines that should aid architects in the selection and definition of architecture description approaches that are apt for a specific (communication) context.