Enterprise Architecture at Work

An enterprise architecture tries to describe and control an organisation's structure, processes, applications, systems and techniques in an integrated way. The unambiguous specification and description of components and their relationships in such an architecture requires a coherent architecture modelling language.

Lankhorst and his co-authors 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. They provide architects with concrete instruments that improve their architectural practice. As this is not enough, they additionally present techniques and heuristics for communicating with all relevant stakeholders about these architectures. Since an architecture model is useful not only for providing insight into the current or future situation but can also be used to evaluate the transition from 'as-is' to 'to-be', the authors also describe analysis methods for assessing both the qualitative impact of changes to an architecture and the quantitative aspects of architectures, such as performance and cost issues.

The modelling language and the other techniques presented have been proven in practice in many real-life case studies. So this book is an ideal companion for enterprise IT or business architects in industry as well as for computer or management science students studying the field of enterprise architecture.

Marc Lankhorst has worked with the Telematica Instituut in Enschede, The Netherlands as a researcher on software and enterprise architecture since 1996. He is reponsible for the group of software engineers of the institute and he has managed the ArchiMate project, a co-operation between several partners from industry and academia, concerned with modelling, visualisation and analysis of enterprise architectures. Additionally he teaches courses on architecture at the University of Twente and at Delft University of Technology.