An epistemological basis for alignment in Enterprise Architecture views

Abstract

In several Enterprise Architectures (EA), the views at the CXO-levels may often be at variance with the views provided to mid-tier and operations levels. As a result of this misalignment, organizations may not be able to fully realize the intended enhancements to business management. Alignment of architecture views with one another, as well as consistency with the overall architecture description of the enterprise can be achieved by developing an epistemological basis for enterprise architecture management. In this paper, an approach to develop such a basis is proposed through use of Omnispective Analysis and Reasoning (OAR), an epistemic framework for managing intellectual concerns. This approach focuses on ensuring that the representation of enterprise concerns captures the necessary information regarding their applicability, correctness and completeness for a given problem scenario, and facilitates development of localized ontologies for describing the behavior of component systems and the interactions between them. An example of architecture view alignment is presented to illustrate the approach.