Embracing Imperfection in Enterprise Architecture Models

In Enterprise Architecture (EA) projects, models are built to represent business and Information Technologies (IT) elements, and to abstract the relation between them in one enterprise under study. The construction of EA models depends on information provided by different kinds of sources, but sources could be insufficient or information could be incomplete or incorrect regarding aspects of the enterprise. As a result, modelers must often create models based on low quality information that could not properly represent the enterprise. Since EA models are used as the base for the analysis of the enterprise, using models that do not represent the enterprise correctly, there is a risk that the analysis produces unreliable conclusions. This paper presents a proposal for managing imperfect models in the EA context. An imperfect model is capable of representing information that can be imprecise, inconsistent, vague, uncertain, or incomplete; thus, when analyses are performed, they can use this information to produce more reliable results. In this proposal, imperfect models also include information about modeler decisions.