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Many stakeholders within and outside the company can be identified, ranging
from top-level management to software engineers. Each stakeholder
requires specific information presented in an accessible way, to deal with
the impact of such wide-ranging developments. To predict the effects of
such developments and modifications of an organisation’s business and IT,
it is necessary but very difficult to obtain an overview of these changes and
their impact on each other, and to provide both decision makers and engineers
implementing the changes with the information they need.
This book is about enterprise architecture, the practice that tries to describe
and control an organisation’s structure, processes, applications, systems,
and technology in such an integrated way. More specifically, we focus
on methods and techniques for making and using integrated descriptions
by means of architecture models, visualisation of these models for
various stakeholders, and analysis of the impact of changes.
The unambiguous specification and description of components and especially
their relationships in an architecture requires a coherent architecture
modelling language. Such a language must enable integrated modelling
of architectural domains and should be appreciated both by people
from IT and by people with a business background. In this book, we present
such an enterprise modelling language that captures the complexity of
architectural domains and their relations and allows the construction of integrated
enterprise architecture models. We provide architects with concrete
instruments that may improve their architectural practice.
Furthermore, we provide techniques and heuristics for communicating
with all relevant stakeholders about these architectures. Central to the
communication of architectures is the notion of viewpoint. Viewpoints define
abstractions on the set of models representing the enterprise architecture,
each aimed at a particular type of stakeholder and addressing a particular
set of concerns. |
