On Using Enterprise Modelling Methods for Building Enterprise Architecture

Abstract: The most important characteristic of enterprise architecture (EA) is that, it provides a holistic view of the enterprise. EA needs to consider about different aspects, views and viewpoints in an enterprise in order to make an enterprise more understandable and communicable to achieve organization goals and objectives. To do this matter EA needs to use different techniques or enterprise modeling methods to achieve different results of EA (documents/artifacts, models, goals/benefits). But many organization for building EA, use their own description techniques and conventions instead of using existing techniques or existing EMMs. They might use one technique which is not appropriate for modeling all aspects of EA. Our purpose is to discover the usefulness of EMMs in the process of construction EA to provide expected results of EA. We investigated about different EMMs to see its usefulness in producing which expected EA result. In order to increase the accuracy of the final results we investigated about different EMMs with respect to important EA aspects. To perform this study we have gone through a survey to validate EA important aspects and essential results of EA. Results of our study conducted based on both using literature review for studying about the usefulness of different EMMs and the results of our survey (EA aspects and results of EA). The results of this research show that Business, Organization, Technical, Information and Decision Making are five important aspects of EA; different EMMs can be used to produce several results of EA. We used table to illustrate the results of the study for each EA aspect separately. Our analysis revealed that the Decision Making and Information aspects of EA could get more help from EMMs compare to the other aspects, since the main focus of some of these methods such as GERAM, GRAI and GIM are mainly accumulated in these two aspects.