Towards A Method for Developing Reference Enterprise Architectures

Abstract

In most economic sectors organizations face rapid environmental changes like regulations. Such changes can force them to adjust both their organizational and operational structure. For instance, in the energy utility sector numerous developments moved German Public Utilities (PUs) towards a liberalized market. Nowadays PUs have to stay competitive while managing a heterogeneous information technology (IT) landscape. We address this demand for aligning business and IT by combining the holistic perspective of Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) with the characteristic of reference modeling to reuse knowledge in a problem domain. Therefore, we utilize configurative reference modeling within Design Science Research (DSR). The artefact at hand is a method for developing a Reference Enterprise Architecture (R-EA), which is applied in the problem domain of PUs. Our contributions are the (i) adaptation of Configurative Reference Modelling (CRM) to develop a R-EA and (ii) a procedure how to elicit knowledge for R-EA development method