A Case Study Investigation of a Lightweight, Systematic Elicitation Approach for Enterprise Architecture Requirements

• Published in: Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering Vol. 551; pp. 33 - 45
• Main Authors: Rosasco, Nicholas, Dehlinger, Josh
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 01.01.2015; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Communications in Computer and Information Science
• Subjects: Enterprise architecture; Grounded Theory Method; Information architecture; Information retrieval; Requirements engineering; Software Engineering
• ISBN: 9783319272177; 3319272179
• ISSN: 1865-0929; 1865-0937
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-27218-4_3

Enterprise architectures (EA) try to develop an alignment between an enterprise’s technology infrastructures with its business objectives and are often facilitated by an EA framework (EAF). EAFs provide the processes to create and govern an EA and have been used to understand both strategy and business architecture to synthesize a supporting information system infrastructure. However, existing EAFs do not provide lightweight, systematic process for eliciting the needed inputs to develop an EA. The contribution of this work is a lightweight, systematic approach for eliciting the enterprise vision, mission and objective requirements necessary as input to an EAF. We make two basic claims for this idea. First, the utilization of the Vision-Mission-Objectives-Strategy-Tactics (VMOST) queries provides a lightweight approach for eliciting required EA knowledge from stakeholders. Second, the use of the Grounded Theory Method, a qualitative analysis technique, provides a structured, systematic approach for analyzing and documenting elicited EA requirements. To illustrate these claims, we apply our lightweight, EA elicitation approach to a real world enterprise using the case study approach as a research methodology.