A Configurator for Visual Analysis of Enterprise Architectures

Enterprise Architecture (EA) management seeks to mutually align business and IT while fostering flexibility to react upon environment changes appropriately. Highly distributed data within the entire enterprise is collected to facilitate decision making processes during enterprise transformations. At the same time enterprise architects and EA stakeholders have new and arising questions hard to predict in advance. Visualizations are a common means for decision makers to analyze complex information about the entire enterprise. Thereby, these visualizations are commonly generated using model-driven approaches. Although, a common set of best-practice EA visualization types could be distilled, their actual binding to underlying data and organization-specific configuration is still challenging for business users. In order to cope with this challenge, this demo paper presents a configurator for EA visualizations end-users without an IT background are able to create spontaneously. Keywords: Enterprise Architecture, visualization, collaboration 1 Visual Analysis of Enterprise Architectures In recent years, enterprise architectures (EAs) and their corresponding management function received increasing attention from academia and industry. Modern enterprises are confronted with an ever changing economic, regulatory, and technical environment they are forced to continuously adapt to [4]. Performing the necessary and beneficial adaptation is aggravated by the intricate and highly interwoven architecture of the enterprise. Therein, local changes to one organizational artifact, e.g. a business process or a business application, might have unforeseen global consequences and potentially detrimental impacts on related artifacts. Facing the aforementioned challenge, EA management promises to balance between short time business benefit and long term maintainability of both business and IT in an enterprise [4]. To do so, typical decisions concerning the EA need a holistic perspective on the overall make-up of the enterprise, its constituents, and their dependencies. This perspective nevertheless depends on 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_scjOxZ49hY, last accessed on: 2013-07-15 the actual EA management-problem to be addressed, as the key stakeholders of the EA, namely enterprise architects and C-level executives, require different information during decision making. Additionally, the relevant information has to be presented in a stakeholder-specific way in graphical architecture descriptions [7]. The employed architecture views vary widely with respect to the used visualization elements, but also with respect to the information visualized. Repository Abstract Viewpoint Visualization Design Databinding Software engineer Designer Data steward Data custodian End-user Modeling Configuration Rendering p o r a d EA Visualization Communication effort Required periphery Scope of this paper Fig. 1. Overview of the model driven approach to EA visualizations In recent years, an approach to support the automated generation of graphical EA descriptions based on arbitrary underlying information models has been developed [8, 7, 2]. Central to this approach is the idea to describe a viewpoint as a model-to-model transformation from the information model to the visualization model [1], an expressive model for describing visualizations. A particular transformation defines which information model concepts are translated into which visualization elements. Research in close cooperation with practitioners has shown that this approach can be beneficially applied in the context of EA management. Nevertheless, the development and definition of the actual modelto-model transformation remains a central but complex part of the design process, as prevalent model-transformation languages are complex to understand, especially for the stakeholder of an EA visualization tool. Further, the application cases revealed that users want to perform customizations, i.e. minor adaptations, of the visualizations with respect to the visualized information, e.g. by replacing one type from the information model with a different one. A possible example would be ‘database management systems per server’ instead of ‘business applications per server’. The delineated shortcomings for visualizations in the context of EA management motivate the objective addressed in this demo paper: How can business users be empowered to configure visualizations that are bind to an arbitrary EA information model? 2 Configurable Enterprise Architecture Visualizations Prevailing approaches for generating EA visualizations typically take into account multiple steps performed by a variety of different actors as displayed in Figure 1. During the modeling step the required information is gathered from stakeholders or existing information sources in the organization (cf. e.g. [5]). The result of the data binding step is a mapping, i.e. model-to-model transformation, between information model elements and an abstract viewpoint definition, i.e. a visualization type. As motivated above, typically this step requires specific knowledge from expert users. The definition of the abstract viewpoint is performed within a visualization design step. During configuration, the abstract viewpoint is detailed with e.g. color encodings, axis descriptions, and symbols. As a result, these subsequent steps lead to a communication effort between the various actors. We aim at providing better end-user support for the creation of these configurable EA visualizations. In particular, we focus on the data binding and configuration to reduce the required communication effort. Custo mer Produc t Produc t Plan Materi al Customer record Client database Insurance claim Product database Procuremen t database Sales record Cluster X14 SAP CRM Customer