Towards a language for coherent enterprise architecture descriptions

TLDR

A coherent architecture description aids insight, communication, and change management, yet no existing language fully supports integrated enterprise modeling, and business‑IT alignment is central. The paper focuses on the requirements and design of a language that enables such integrated enterprise modeling. The language defines generic, organization‑independent concepts that can be specialized or composed, aligns with standards such as UML, adds missing concepts for inter‑domain relationships, and supports linking to models in other languages.

Abstract

A coherent description of architectures provides insight, enables communication among different stakeholders and guides complicated (business and ICT) change processes. Unfortunately, so far no architecture description language exists that fully enables integrated enterprise modeling. In this paper we focus on the requirements and design of such a language. This language defines generic, organization-independent concepts that can be specialized or composed to obtain more specific concepts to be used within a particular organisation. It is not our intention to re-invent the wheel for each architectural domain: wherever possible we conform to existing languages or standards such as UML. We complement them with missing concepts, focusing on concepts to model the relationships among architectural domains. The concepts should also make it possible to define links between models in other languages. The relationship between architecture descriptions at the business layer and at the application layer (business-IT alignment) plays a central role.