Experimenting with the expressive power of an enterprise architecture framework

Abstract

Enterprise Architecture (EA) frameworks are used to model an enterprise organization; they attempt to fill the gap between the business model and the computer application model. In particular they can be used to model aspects of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). Considering several known general frameworks discussed in this work, a new framework, called EAIF is presented, to unify different concepts and terminology concerning enterprise systems architecture and integration. EAIF, expressed in UML, extends the Brown's integration model for CASE technology, refining each abstraction level into the backward, forward and upward integration views of Sandoe's recent approach of enterprise integration. EAIF helps documenting and detecting inconsistencies in the definition of business processes, services adapted to these processes and mechanisms implementing these services. The main goal of this work is to evaluate the applicability of EAIF as an EA framework and experiment its expressive power with two enterprise systems as case studies. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.