Application of inductive reference modeling approaches to enterprise architecture models

Abstract

Enterprise architectures (EA) help organizations to analyze interrelations among their strategy, business processes, application landscape and information structures. Such ambitious endeavors can be supported by using reference models for EA. In recent years, research has increasingly been investigating inductive methods for reference model development. However, the characteristics of EA models have not been considered in this context yet. We therefore aim to adapt existing inductive approaches to the domain of reference enterprise architectures development. Using design science research our work contributes to the reference modeling community with (i) a comparative analysis of inductive reference modeling methods regarding their applicability to EA models, (ii) the refinement of an identified approach to reference EA design and (iii) its application in a use case.