A Technique for Annotating EA Information Models with Goals

Many of today’s enterprises experience the need to establish and conduct management processes to ensure closely alignment between business and IT. Enterprise architecture (EA) management provides a model-based approach to understand and evolve the complex dependencies between the enterprise constituents, as e.g. business processes and business applications. In recent years the understanding of EA management in literature and in practice has converged, but up to this point no commonly accepted standard information model for EA management nor a standard set of goals verifying the overall objective of business/ITalignment have been devised. Grounded in indications that such models and goals are highly enterprise-specific, this paper presents a method for flexible combining EA-relevant goals and EA information models to optimally support EA management in a using company.