Constructing an Enterprise-specific Radar System for Assisted Project Surveillance

Since information technology (IT) plays an increasingly important role for modern enterprises, the number of running IT projects raises steadily. These days, an enterprise architect is confronted with a multitude of projects he or she has to supervise in order to avert potential project threats. As a matter of fact, the number of projects that are to be supervised exceeds the available architects many times over, which makes it nearly impossible for the architect to monitor every single project in detail. To overcome this deficiency, we propose the application of an architecture radar system, which continuously scans ongoing projects for the occurrence of threats arising from specific architectural environments. Whenever an architectural threat is detected by a scan, the responsible enterprise architect is informed to carry out a monitoring of the endangered project. In this paper, we present a method to construct such an architecture radar system. We then expatiate on different categories of threats, which we derive from a holistic model of the enterprise architecture.