Enterprise Architecture at Work

An enterprise architecture tries to describe and control an organisation's structure, processes, applications, systems and techniques in an integrated way. The unambiguous specification and description of components and their relationships in such an architecture requires a coherent architecture modelling language.

Lankhorst and his co-authors present such an enterprise modelling language that captures the complexity of architectural domains and their relations and allows the construction of integrated enterprise architecture models. They provide architects with concrete instruments that improve their architectural practice. As this is not enough, they additionally present techniques and heuristics for communicating with all relevant stakeholders about these architectures. Since an architecture model is useful not only for providing insight into the current or future situation but can also be used to evaluate the transition from 'as-is' to 'to-be', the authors also describe analysis methods for assessing both the qualitative impact of changes to an architecture and the quantitative aspects of architectures, such as performance and cost issues.

The modelling language presented has been proven in practice in many real-life case studies and has been adopted by The Open Group as an international standard. So this book is an ideal companion for enterprise IT or business architects in industry as well as for computer or management science students studying the field of enterprise architecture.

As Principal Advisor Enterprise Architecture, Marc Lankhorst is responsible for Novay's activities on enterprise, business and IT architecture. His expertise and interests range from enterprise architecture and business process management to service orientation and model-driven software development. Marc headed the project that developed the ArchiMate^® standard for architecture modelling, described in the book 'Enterprise Architecture at Work' (2^nd ed., Springer 2009). He is a board member of the Netherlands Architecture Forum (NAF), one of the editors of Via Nova Architectura, and  a TOGAF^® 9-certified enterprise architect. He holds a M.Sc. from the University of Twente and a Ph.D. from the University of Groningen.