A Model-based approach to Managing Enterprise Information Systems

Abstract

Organizations must evolve their information systems (IS) in order to adapt to changes in their environment or to maintain or enhance competitiveness. The use of modern application integration technologies (e.g., middleware) and advanced network technologies has resulted in IS that provide services at unprecedented levels, but at the price of becoming more complex and thus more difficult to evolve. By way of concrete examples, this paper focuses on the use of system models expressed in the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to effectively manage information systems assets. The system models capture critical information about an organization and are part of an overall framework called the Application Mapping Framework or AMF. The AMF can be used by IT architects and planners to track applications, relate descriptions of system artifacts across different levels of abstraction and support redundancy, gap and impact analyses. The paper also identifies management roles needed to ensure that the AMF repository contains comprehensive and upto-date models.