Improving the Quality of Enterprise Architecture Models

Information technology (IT) pervades organizations more and more and becomes increasingly important for their business models. It has evolved from a purely supportive role to an important strategic pillar in many organizations. Even more, it is important that IT is aligned to the needs of the organization. Approaches that realize this are often subsumed under the term "business-IT-alignment". One instrument for achieving business-IT-alignment is Enterprise Architecture (EA). EAs provide a holistic perspective on the structure of the organization and provide a set of techniques to guide and steer the evolution of the organization to a desired goal state.

A key artifact of EA is the EA model. It abstracts the elements and their relationships to an understandable and manageable measure. Usually enterprise architects model business processes, applications, hardware components, data models and customer relationships. Based on the information stored in the EA model, the organization's management makes important decisions regarding future focus. Contrary, also on the operational level, the model can provide important information, for example which application is used in which business environment and exchanges data with other applications.

In order to be able to derive meaningful decisions from the EA model, their quality is of crucial importance. Therefore, this work elaborates on developing different processes and techniques that ensure the quality of the EA model.