Facilitating Conflict Resolution of Models for Automated Enterprise Architecture Documentation

Enterprise Architecture (EA) management relies on solid and up-to-date information about the current state of an EA. In current practices the manual collection of information is prevailing resulting in an error-prone, time-consuming, and expensive task. Recent research efforts seek to automate this task by integrating existing information sources in the organization to optimize the EA documentation process. While automation of EA documentation enables many advantages, the transformation of the collected information to an EA model remains an unresolved challenge since it cannot be automated completely. In particular, conflicts resulting from partial transformations require involvement of EA Stakeholders possibly not having a technical background. In this paper we propose an approach for the conflict resolution facilitating our long-term goal of automated EA documentation. We illustrate our approach using a productive Enterprise Service Bus from a leading organization of the fashion industry and evaluate our approach with expert interviews.