A Federated Approach to Enterprise Architecture Model Maintenance

Enterprise architecture is gaining acceptance as an approach to manage change and foster IT/business alignment by (1) propagating strategy and process changes to the software and infrastructure level, by (2) supporting consistent business transformation enabled by technology innovations, and by (3) decoupling business-oriented and technology-oriented architectures. Due to constant change in business as well as in technology, enterprise architecture management is a permanent process rather than a one-time effort. To keep enterprise architecture models up-to-date, a well-engineered maintenance concept including processes, roles and schedules is needed. This paper discusses the shortcomings of existing approaches to enterprise architecture model maintenance, proposes a federated approach, and reports on its implementation at a large financial service provider.