Tool Support for Enterprise Architecture Management - Strengths and Weaknesses

This paper sketches the approach we have taken in an extensive survey to evaluate existing tools providing support for enterprise architecture (EA) management. From there, we outline important strengths and weaknesses of existing EA management tools discovered in the survey and suggest some approaches for improving the tool support available in this field. The tool evaluation, to which the paper refers, is built on a definition of EA management, which we operationalized via a set of scenarios, which constitute a sufficiently concrete base for making precise statements about the tool support. The paper outlines some scenarios, which are constructed to be representative for EA management, and therefore cover typical tasks. In order to ensure the representativeness of the scenarios, they were validated by ten of our industry partners. Considering the results of the evaluation, which covered nine EA management tools, we show characteristic strengths and weaknesses common to the tools. From this analysis, which e.g. covered the tools´ metamodeling capabilities, the methodologies they offer to address EA management, and especially their visualization-specific capabilities, we suggest areas for further improvement regarding the software support for EA management. This is meant as a contribution to the field of EA management, which we view as not adequately addressable in practice without tool support due to the inherent complexity of this field