A Business Process-centered Approach for Modeling Enterprise Architectures

Mastering an Enterprise Architecture is crucial for the entire enterprise to operate most efficiently. However, there is a lack of appropriate means to appropriately visualize and communicate traceability from business processes to other enterprise architectural entities such as e.g. the supporting IT infrastructure. Therefore, systematic in-depth analysis of the entire Enterprise Architecture is barely feasible. This paper aims to introduce a semi-formal and business process-centered modeling approach for capturing complex Enterprise Architectures based on the wellestablished modeling techniques BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) and UML (Unified Modeling Language). A meta model formalizing the approach is presented. It is feasible to apply customizable views tailored to stakeholder-specific concerns providing standardized levels of abstraction to the model in order to improve communication of the big picture of an Enterprise Architecture. A case study illustrates the approach.