A meta-language for EA information modeling - State-of-the-art and requirements elicitation

Abstract

Enterprise architecture (EA) management has not only recently gained importance as means to support enterprises in adapting to a changing market environment and in seizing new business opportunities. This twofold role of EA management in transforming enterprises is connected to describing the current state as well as future states of the EA. Although different information models for the description of these states have yet been proposed in literature, no 'standard' information model exists, and the plurality advocates for the idea that such models are enterprise-specific design artifacts. In this paper, we explore the fundamentals of EA information modeling, namely the meta-languages underlying today's models, and analyze their diversity. Based on the analysis, we elicit requirements for a "unifying" meta-language. By showing that multi-purpose modeling facilities, as the OMG's UML, fail to fully satisfy these requirements, we establish a future field of research - a meta-language for EA information modeling. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.