From EA management patterns towards a prescriptive theory for designing enterprise-specific EA management functions

1 Motivation Today's enterprises find themselves confronted with a changing economic, regulatory, and technical environment that they are forced to adapt to (Ross et al. 2006, Wagter et al. 2005). Performing the necessary and beneficial adaptations is aggravated by the intricate and highly interwoven architecture of the overall enterprise. Therein, local changes to one enterprise artifact, e.g. a business process or a business application, might have unforeseen global consequences at and potentially detrimental impacts on related artifacts. The enterprise architecture (EA) describes the interwoven system of these artifacts and their cause-effect relationships. Therefore, comprehensive knowledge about the EA may support an enterprise to avoid or reduce negative side-effects of adaptations, and may help to leverage the full benefits that can be drawn from an environmental change. Supporting the managed evolution of the enterprise's architecture with a focus on business/IT alignment is the core task of EA management. Driven by the demand from practice, a multitude of approaches to EA management has been developed by practitioners (cf. The research field of EA management is a relatively new but emerging one. One of the first publications concerning the topic EA management was written by Zachman (1987). Since that time the number of publications targeting the topic is increasing (Langenberg and Wegmann 2004). From there, different approaches rooted in various disciplines as e.g. meta-modeling (cf. Frank 2002) or systems